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During the Cold War the United States never deployed nuclear weapons in Iceland but a recently declassified State Department record shows that U.S. government officials debated whether they should do so, including through secret deployments. A letter from a U.S. ambassador to Iceland in August 1960, published today by the National Security Archive, rejected such proposals, but the revelation of internal discussions on the subject ties in to the broader issue of the practice of U.S. nuclear deployments overseas during the Cold War.

The author of the recently released letter, U.S. Ambassador Tyler Thompson, was aware that Icelandic authorities wondered whether Washington had ever deployed nuclear weapons there. Recognizing that Iceland’s ties to NATO and the Western security system were fragile, he argued that if Reykjavik learned about a secret deployment, it could leave NATO. Furthermore, a “dramatic row” could “be expected to have an unfortunate effect on our friends and allies, to affect adversely our interests as far as neutrals are concerned, and to provide a propaganda field day for our enemies.”

U.S. Ambassador to Iceland Tyler Thompson, whose long letter to the State Department raised critical questions about the possibility of secret nuclear deployments in Iceland (National Archives, Still Pictures Branch, RG 59-SO, box 17).

All references to Iceland were deleted from the archival release of Thompson’s letter but his signature and other evidence confirms that the subject matter was Iceland. Further research indicated that nuclear weapons had been an issue in U.S. relations with Iceland since the Korean War when Icelandic officials asked whether the U.S. had deployment plans. Washington did not, but at the time Thompson wrote the letter U.S. officials were exploring nuclear storage options and secret deployments. Moreover, archival documents discovered by an Icelandic historian and published here today demonstrate that the United States had plans for at least one nuclear weapons storage site in the event World War III broke out.

Included in today’s posting are:

▪ A request for assurance in November 1951 by Foreign Minister Bjarni Benediktsson that the United States was not planning an “atomic base” in Iceland

▪ A State Department telegram from December 1951 authorizing the U.S. minister to assure Benediktsson that the United States “has no (rpt no) intention [of] going beyond letter or spirit of [the] defense agreement” which had been negotiated earlier in the year.

▪ A question posed by Foreign Minister Guðmundur Í. Guðmundsson to ambassador Thompson in June 1960: was the United States keeping atomic bombs at Keflavik air base or carrying them through the base in transit?

▪ A draft reply to Guðmundsson’s question indicating that nuclear weapons had not been deployed in Iceland but noting that CINCLANT [Commander-in-Chief, Atlantic Command] had a “requirement” for a nuclear weapons storage site.

That the United States never deployed nuclear weapons to Iceland is a settled issue. In 1998, Robert S. Norris, William Arkin, and this writer published an article in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in which they analyzed a recently declassified Defense Department history of U.S. nuclear deployments from 1945 to 1978. The study included several alphabetically arranged lists of nuclear weapons deployments in various parts of the world, including Western European members of NATO. Because many country and place names were excised the writers made educated guesses about some of them. One guess was Iceland. Certain details, such as Strategic Air Command activities during the 1950s, appeared to support the conclusion. The report in The Bulletin was widely publicized and when the news reached Iceland it created a political furor; the Icelandic government quickly denied the premise and the Clinton administration immediately supported the denial. In a significant departure from the usual “neither confirm nor deny” approach to nuclear weapons locations, the U.S. deputy chief of mission in Reykjavik declared that putting Iceland on the list of Cold War nuclear deployment sites was “incorrect.” Further research led to the identification of Iwo Jima as the deployment site.[1]

The fact that the U.S. government never deployed nuclear weapons in Iceland does not mean, however, that it had no nuclear plans for Iceland. Previous research by Valur Ingimundarson and William Arkin demonstrates that during the Cold War Iceland was considered a potential storage site. As Ingimundarson discovered, at the end of the 1950s the U.S. Navy ordered the construction of a facility for storing nuclear depth bombs, an Advanced Underseas Weapons (AUW) Shop at the outskirts of Keflavik airport. The AUW facility was built by local Icelandic workers who thought its purpose was to store torpedoes. Whether Ambassador Thompson knew about it remains to be learned. During the 1980s Arkin reported that a presidential directive from the Nixon period treated Iceland as one of several “Conditional Deployment” locations, where nuclear weapons could be stored in the event of war. An AUW storage facility would make sense in that context. Nevertheless, all such arrangements were kept deeply secret because of the political sensitivity of the U.S. military presence in Iceland.[2]

The heavily excised release of the Thompson letter suggests that the U.S. national security bureaucracy does not presently acknowledge that Iceland figured in American nuclear weapons planning during the Cold War. This is not surprising because the U.S. government has not acknowledged the names of a number of other countries which directly participated in the NATO nuclear weapons stockpile program during the Cold War (and later): Belgium, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey (only West Germany and the United Kingdom have been officially disclosed). As for Iceland’s status as a “conditional” deployment site, even though the horse left the barn years ago in terms of the previous archival releases, time will tell whether declassifiers take that into account when making future decisions on classified historical documents concerning Iceland and nuclear weapons.

Pictured here is a MK-101 “Lulu” nuclear depth bomb. which the U.S. Navy could have deployed to a storage site at Kefllavik airport, Iceland, in the event of World War III. Weighing 1,200 pounds, with an explosive yield of between 10 and 15 kilotons, the Lulu was in service from the late 1950s to 1971. An air-dropped weapon designed for use by all Navy aircraft, Lulu would have been available to British, Canadian, and Dutch naval forces under NATO nuclear sharing arrangements. (Source: photograph by Mike Fazarckly at Nuclear Weapons: A Guide to British Nuclear Weapons. Thanks to Stephen Schwartz for pointing out these photos.)

DOCUMENTS

Document 1: U.S. Legation Reykjavik telegram number 82 to State Department, 18 November 1951, Secret

Source: U.S. National Archives, Record Group 59, Department of State records [RG 59], Central Decimal Files 1950-1954 [CDF], 711.56340B/11-1851

On 5 May 1951, Iceland and the United States secretly signed a defense agreement which became public just two days later. Under the agreement, the United States took over the defense of Iceland, a decision which local elites believed was necessary in light of the Korean War and Iceland’s historically disarmed status. The arrangement was nonetheless contentious for many citizens and by some accounts bordered on illegal; the three major non-Communist parties therefore agreed to keep parliament in recess to minimize controversy (when Iceland joined NATO in 1949, riots had broken out). Two days later, on 7 May, 300 U.S. troops arrived, the first of a contingent which the Icelandic government limited to a tightly sequestered 3,900 troops out of fear of adverse public reaction (to the point that Reykjavik successfully insisted on the exclusion of African-American soldiers).

While the fine print of the defense agreement was still being negotiated, in November 1951 Foreign Minister Benediktsson showed U.S. Chargé d’Affaires Morris N. Hughes a London Times article quoting Senator Edwin Johnson (D-CO) that Iceland, North Africa, and Turkey were better deployment sites for atomic weapons than the United Kingdom. To assuage the foreign minister’s concern that Communist Party members and other critics would exploit Johnson’s statement, Hughes recommended “official reassurance” that the United States had no plans to deploy atomic weapons in Iceland.

Document 2: U.S. Legation Reykjavik telegram number 85 to State Department, 24 November 1951, Secret

Source: RG 59, CDF, 711.56340B/11-2451

A few days after the above exchange, Benediktsonn told Hughes that he had showed him the Times article so he could tell “critics and worried colleagues” that he had immediately sought U.S. reassurances about U.S. atomic plans. When the foreign minister wondered whether an “appropriate quarter” could provide “some reassurance,” Hughes agreed to inform the State Department “of his anxiety.” The reference to McGaw is to General Edward John McGaw, the first commander of the Iceland Defense Force, the U.S. unified command which provided for Iceland’s military security from 1951 to 2006.

Chargé Hughes reported that the Communist newspaper, Thjodviljinn [Will of the Nation] had commented on Senator Johnson’s statement, noting that the “Americans feel that it does not matter if Iceland should be subjected to the attack and horrors such bases would bring

upon the nation.”

Document 4: U.S. Legation Reykjavik telegram number 97 to State Department, 20 December 1951, Secret

Source: RG 59, CDF, 711.56340B/12-1951

With no answer to his question about atomic bases, Benediktsonn asked Hughes again about the problem, noting that Communist opponents could “embarrass” him.

Document 5: State Department telegram 98 to U.S. Legation Reykjavik, 21 December 1951, Top Secret

Source: RG 59, CDF, box 3180, 711.56340B/11-2451

Benediktsonn’s second query was the charm. Responding to Hughes’ message, a State Department telegram sent under the name of Secretary of State Dean Acheson warned that any public statements would violate the policy to “not deny or affirm rumors” about the locations of atomic weapons. That was a military necessity to prevent the Soviet Union from determining the “pattern” of U.S. defenses. Nevertheless, the Department authorized Hughes to inform Benediktsonn confidentially that the United States would “make no move without [the] full consultation and agreement” of Iceland’s government.

Document 6: U.S. Legation Reykjavik Despatch 238 to State Department, “Further Reaction to Threatened Use of Iceland as Atomic Base,” 29 December 1951, Secret

Source: RG 59, CDF, box 3180, 711.56340B/12-2951

Hughes provided a fuller account of his meeting with Benediktsonn on 20 December and of his efforts during the holidays to pass on the gist of the State Department message to the permanent undersecretary and then to the foreign minister himself at a dinner. Whether there were any follow-up discussions remains unclear because the records covering the 1952-1954 period in the 711.56340B decimal file series are missing from box 3181.[3]

According to the State Department summary of telegram 367 from the U.S. Embassy in Iceland, in light of the recent U-2 crisis, Foreign Minister Guðmundur Í. Guðmundsson asked Ambassador Thompson whether the United States had used Keflavik air base for U-2 flights, had stored nuclear weapons there or had moved them through Keflavik. While the Foreign Minister had not asked for assurances about advance agreement, according to the summary Thompson “feels that the storage of atomic warheads in Iceland without the latter’s prior agreement would be a mistake and suggests that, if we have no intention to do this, we so inform the Icelandic Government without awaiting its request to this effect.” This conversation is cited on the bottom of page 2 of the Tyler Thompson letter (Document 8) with the references to Iceland excised.

From the original Air Force caption: “A view of the famous Terminal Hotel at Keflavik Airport, Iceland, is pictured here. In the foreground are two MATS [Military Air Transport Service] aircraft parked out front of the hotel.” Ambassador Thompson’s letter captured the problems raised by the air base’s wide open status for proposals for secret nuclear weapons storage: the base’s “security problem” was “complicated by the small size of the secure areas, accessibility of the base to the public, the small community atmosphere there with everyone knowing to a large extent what is going on, and the speculation which new, and stricter security regulations might arouse.” (National Archives, Still Pictures Branch, RG 342-B, box 1458, Foreign Locations—Iceland)

In response to Guðmundsson’s questions about U-2 flights and nuclear weapons, State Department officials prepared a response; the finished, delivered version remains classified in State Department decimal files, but drafts of the response are available, of which the one dated 1 July 1960 is probably close to what was sent. The ambassador could assure the foreign minister that the U.S. had not stored nuclear weapons in Iceland or shipped them through Keflavik airbase. But this information was not for public consumption because of the U.S. government’s “neither confirm nor deny” policy. In response to Thompson’s suggestion that the U.S. pledge that it would consult the Icelandic government in advance about nuclear weapons deployments, the State Department believed this would “not [be] desirable.” Before any assurances could be given the subject would need careful study in Washington; if asked for such assurances, Thompson was to tell Guðmundsson that he needed to seek instructions. Thompson’s letter (below) does not indicate that a follow-up conversation with Guðmundsson had occurred, only the possibility that he might ask the question about nuclear deployments again.

The 24 June draft telegram mentions the CINCLANT requirement for a nuclear weapons storage site and its ongoing construction but that item was dropped from the 1 July draft, perhaps because of its sensitivity. The final version of the telegram remains classified but has been requested.

Probably to respond to the issues raised by Guðmundsson’s questions, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Ivan White sent Thompson a letter on 21 July 1960. It was one of those “official informal” communications then used by State Department officials to communicate with its embassies on matters that were too complex and sensitive to handle by telegram. White’s letter has not surfaced and is not indexed in the State Department decimal files. But judging from the tenor of Thompson’s reply, White may have asserted that the U.S. government was free to deploy nuclear weapons in Iceland without securing the agreement of Reykjavik. If that was the case, the Eisenhower administration had departed from the Acheson policy of assuring “full consultation and agreement.” It is possible that the previous ambassador, John Muccio, was the individual whom Thompson described as “recommending against prior consultation” out of fear that information about the deployment would leak to the Soviets.

If war was imminent or had broken out, Thompson believed that a secret emergency deployment would be permissible, but under peacetime circumstances he recommended seeking Iceland’s consent. Given that the Soviets probably suspected that Iceland was already a storage site, Thompson believed that it would be worse if the government of Iceland discovered a secret deployment; that would produce a diplomatic crisis, including Iceland’s possible withdrawal from NATO under protest. Moreover, “from the point of view of respect for the rights and sovereignty of [Iceland], the fact that it might not agree to the storage of nuclear weapons here could be considered as making prior consultations all the more necessary.”

To make deployments technically possible, Thompson suggested the construction of storage areas, but consulting the government if Washington ever wanted to use them. If war was approaching it would be possible to deploy weapons under emergency conditions because the possibility of objections would be “minimized.” If, however, the United States wanted to use the storage areas for actual deployments it should consult the Icelandic government. Thompson may not have been aware of the SACLANT storage site mentioned in the draft telegram cited above.

Thompson’s letter met with some internal criticism, mainly on the first page: a handwritten “no” next to his observation that U.S. nuclear weapons storage in NATO countries depends on the agreement of the country concerned; a question mark next to the comment about Canadian consent for storage of nuclear weapons in Canada; a comment “No! Canada on record,” suggesting that Ottawa would accept clandestine U.S. storage; and another comment which is harder to decipher: “tech … doesn’t get UK OK.”

For the archival release of this letter the State Department and the Defense Department justified the excision on two grounds. The State Department cited Section 3.3 (b) (6) of Executive Order 13526 – that declassification would “reveal information, including foreign government information, that would cause serious harm to relations between the United States and a foreign government, or to ongoing diplomatic activities of the United States.” The Defense Department cited exemption (b) (6), ruling that declassification would “reveal formally named or numbered U.S. military war plans that remain in effect, or reveal operational or tactical elements of prior plans that are contained in such active plans.” Whether the declassification of a document which is well over half a century old could have such impacts on U.S. diplomacy or military planning appears highly doubtful.

Notes

[1]. William Arkin, Robert S. Norris, and William Burr, “They Were,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November –December 1999, pp. 25-35; Arkin, Norris, and Burr, “How Much Did Japan Know,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January-February 2000, pp. 11-13, 78-79.

[2] . Valur Ingimundarson, The Rebellious Ally: Iceland, the United States, and the Politics of Empire, 1945-2006(Dordrech, The Netherlands, 2011), 86; William Arkin, “Iceland Melts,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (50) January-February 2000, p. 80.

[3]. One relevant item that could show up in box 3181 was published in the Foreign Relations of the United States: a memorandum to the Deputy Under Secretary of State on “Additional Military Operating Requirements in Iceland,” dated 12 June 1952. It briefly recounts the discussions with the Icelandic foreign minister and mentions a NATO request to the U.S. and the Government of Iceland for a strategic air base in Iceland, but any further discussion of nuclear weapons was excised in the FRUS volume.

Interview with Addy Cohen

An interview with Mr. Addy Cohen, a retired official from Israel’s Treasury Ministry, conducted by Ori Rabinowitz, a post-doctoral fellow at Tel Aviv University.

Part of the puzzle about the textile plant cover story is how it came about. While we know that Addy Cohen, the director of the Foreign Aid Office at the Treasury Ministry, used that description when guiding U.S. Ambassador Ogden Reid and some of his staff on a helicopter tour of the Negev in September 1960, the documentary trail has it limits. Cohen, who has just turned 87, and is living outside Tel Aviv, recalls the episode vividly. In a series of written and oral exchanges with the editors of this e-book in recent weeks, he has clarified further what happened.

As a senior official, Cohen was aware of the Dimona project and of its utmost secrecy. The issue of Dimona “was discussed in one of the Treasury Ministry executive meetings under [Minister Levi] Eshkol,” he wrote us. The helicopter tour covered various development projects that the U.S. supported, and they were on their way from the Dead Sea. “I was not prepared to Ambassador Reid’s question [about the Dimona site] as we flew far north of the structure. I ad libbed by referring to Trostler, the Jerusalemite architect [a relative of Cohen’s wife], who actually designed a textile plants” at Dimona.

Surprised by Reid’s query, Cohen improvised an answer that was not completely false. In retrospect, as he wrote on March 5, 2015, “It may have transpired that I was the first one who referred to the project as a ‘textile plant’ but I can assure you that it was not planned.”

Washington, D.C., April 15, 2015 – The U.S. government first learned of Israel’s secret nuclear program at Dimona from an American corporate official talking to U.S. diplomats in Tel Aviv during mid-summer 1960, according to a declassified document published today for the first time by the National Security Archive, the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project, and the Center for Nonproliferation Studies of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. Other documents published today detail the discovery of the secret project that some in the U.S. government believed from the very start aimed at a weapons capability; the U.S. debates over Israel’s lack of candor; and U.S. government efforts to pressure the Israelis to answer key questions about the nature of the Dimona project.

This “discovery,” which came as the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower was drawing to a close, caused apprehension in Washington by raising concern about regional stability and nuclear proliferation, but it also produced annoyance because Israeli officials at all levels repeatedly provided less than credible answers to U.S. questions about Dimona. Thus, in September 1960, when embassy officials asked about a new construction site when they were on a helicopter ride nearby, an adroit Israeli official, Addy Cohen, improvised a story to keep the secret: it was the site of a textile factory, he said; a story that was not wholly false because there was a textile plant near Dimona. An interview with Addy Cohen detailing the episode appears in this posting for the first time.

Documents published in this collection shed light on a particularly notable intelligence failure: how Washington missed warning signs that the Israelis had a nuclear project underway, but also how the U.S. belatedly realized what the Israelis were doing, and how Eisenhower and his senior advisers reacted to this discovery. Among the documents are:

The June 1959 Israel-Norway secret agreement providing for the sale of Norwegian heavy water to Israel (through the United Kingdom), transmitted by Oslo Embassy political officer Richard Kerry (father of Secretary of State John Kerry).

Reports about information from a then-covert source — University of Michigan nuclear engineering professor Henry Gomberg — who learned that the Israelis had a secret nuclear reactor project that involved experiments with plutonium.

A telegram from the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv reporting on Finance Ministry official Addy Cohen’s statement that “we’ve been misbehaving,” and one by an unidentified official close to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion that the secrecy surrounding Dimona was unjustifiable and that it was “a stupid mistake on the part of Israel.”

Reports by U.S. Ambassador Ogden Reid on conversations with Ben-Gurion.

A State Department message to the embassy in Tel Aviv conveying irritation that the responses of the Israeli government showed a “lack of candor.”

Messages about a role for the International Atomic Energy Agency in inspecting and safeguarding Dimona.

* * * * *

The Eisenhower Administration and the Discovery of Dimona: March 1958-January 1961

By Avner Cohen and William Burr

In the last months of 1960 as the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower was coming to a close, the U.S. government discovered that Israel had been building, with French assistance, a secret nuclear reactor near Dimona in the Negev Desert that could give Israel a nuclear weapons potential. The discovery caused apprehension within the Eisenhower administration by invoking concerns about regional stability and nuclear proliferation, but it also produced annoyance because Israeli officials at all levels provided less than credible answers to U.S. questions about Dimona.

One episode that helped create a sense of deception was that, in response to initial U.S. official questions about the construction site, the Israelis said it would be a textile factory. Over the years the “textile factory” story has acquired legendary status, but exactly when the story came about has been a mystery. But recently unearthed U.S. government documents — an embassy telegram and a memorandum by the Deputy Chief of Mission — help solve this historical puzzle. They show that during a helicopter flight in September 1960, with American Ambassador Ogden Reid and others of his staff on board, not far from the reactor site, Ambassador Reid (or one of the travelers) asked what the big construction site was. Their host, Addy Cohen, a senior Treasury Ministry official, replied, “Why, that’s a textile plant.” In December 1960, when the Dimona issue was publicly exposed, Cohen was asked why he had said “textile factory.” He responded: “that was our story at the time.” Cohen acknowledged that “we have been misbehaving” by keeping Dimona secret, but justified the project as a “deterrent” against Arab neighbors.

Today the National Security Archive, the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project and the Center for Nonproliferation Studies of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey publish for the first time these two items and other declassified documents on the “discovery” of Dimona. The documents provide new perspectives on how the Eisenhower administration learned about the secret reactor project, how it reacted to the discovery, and how the Israelis responded. Among the findings are these:

The initial “discovery” by the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv of the French-Israeli reactor project was probably in late July 1960, when a U.S. corporate official learned about it from an Israeli oil executive and told U.S. diplomats that the site would be a power reactor. This is the earliest known reference to Dimona.

The admission by French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville on December 16 to Secretary of State Christian Herter that France had helped Israel build the reactor, a “replica of [the] Marcoule plant.” He also told Herter that under the bilateral agreement, France would supply Israel the raw materials and receive any plutonium produced by the plant. In reply to Herter’s question about the plant’s financing, Couve said that he “assumed the money came from [the United States]”

Former Treasury Ministry official Addy Cohen ad libbed the “textile plant” story in response to questions on a helicopter tour [See above and sidebar].

An unidentified official close to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, according to an Embassy telegram, told the Canadian ambassador that the secrecy surrounding Dimona was unjustifiable and that it was “a stupid mistake on the part of Israel.” Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs G. Lewis Jones agreed: It was “stupid of them” and an “unnecessary … Israeli caper.”

The financial aspects of the Dimona project, i.e., cost, financing, and the role of U.S. money — through both the diversion of U.S. government aid and the use of tax-deductible individual charities — played an important role in the Eisenhower administration’s internal deliberations on Dimona. Washington considered applying, but apparently did not use, the power to withhold economic assistance as pressure on Israel.

When the U.S. started asking questions about Dimona, and then when the issue was leaked to the press, an irritated Prime Minister Ben-Gurion asked Ambassador Ogden Reid: “Why in [the] States is everything being told [to] everybody?” Ben-Gurion stuck to the new Israeli cover story, namely, that the Dimona reactor was for peaceful purposes only, and for the economic development of the Negev in particular — no more than a step towards the building of nuclear power stations and the production of electric power, a badly needed resource.

A State Department message to the embassy in Tel Aviv conveyed a sense of irritation with the responses of the Israeli government: Ben-Gurion’s explanations “appear evasive” and the “clearly apparent lack of candor [is] difficult to reconcile with [the] confidence which had traditionally characterized U.S.-Israel relations.” The Department wanted more questions asked and more detailed and frank answers from Ben-Gurion.

In June 1959 Israel and Norway signed a secret agreement providing for Norway to sell heavy water to Israel (through the United Kingdom). According to the U.S. embassy first secretary in Oslo, Richard Kerry (father of Secretary of State John Kerry), disclosure of the agreement could be embarrassing to the Norwegian government in light of its efforts to play the role of an “honest broker” in international conflicts, including in the Middle East.

Also published in this collection are important documents that have been available in previous National Security Archive postings, but are a significant part of the record of the discovery of Dimona, including:

A Special National Intelligence Estimate — SNIE 100-8-60 from 8 December 1960 — that formally determined that “Israel is engaged in construction of a nuclear reactor complex in the Negev near Beersheba” and “plutonium production for weapons is at least one major purpose of this effort.” The SNIE estimated “that Israel will produce some weapons grade plutonium in 1963-64 and possibly as early as 1962.” A significant portion of the SNIE is still classified.

President Eisenhower’s meeting with top advisers on 19 December 1960 to discuss the Dimona problem, ponder the issues raised by Israeli fundraising in the United States, and discuss plans to encourage Israel to open up Dimona to visits by U.S. or reliable foreign scientists and to subject the reactor to International Atomic Energy Agency inspections. Some portions of this meeting record are also still classified.

The post-mortem on SNIE 100-8-60 ordered by the U.S. Intelligence Board whereby the intelligence community tried to determine what pieces of information it had missed and to learn lessons from the intelligence failure.

The Eisenhower administration’s “discovery” during the last months of 1960 that Israel was secretly building a large nuclear complex at Dimona was a belated one indeed. It occurred more than five years after Israel had made a secret national commitment to create a nuclear program aiming at providing an option to produce nuclear weapons; more than three years after Israel had signed its secret comprehensive nuclear bargain with France; and two years or more after Israel had begun the vast excavation and construction work at the Dimona site.

The tardiness of the discovery was a major blunder, what is called in our times an intelligence failure. In comparative terms, it was probably as severe as (or more so than) the failures to anticipate the Indian nuclear tests of in 1974 and 1998. Some of the documents included in this e-book provide clues as to why the discovery was delayed and the roots and causes of the intelligence failure.

What amounted to an intelligence breakdown by the United States was a tremendous counterintelligence success for Israel. The U.S. bungle enabled Israel to buy precious time for the highly vulnerable Dimona project. One could argue that had the United States discovered Dimona two years earlier, perhaps even a year earlier, that the young and fragile undertaking might not have survived. Early political pressure from the United States on the two foreign suppliers, France and Norway, might have terminated it at the very start.

The documents presented here reveal how surprised and angry the Eisenhower administration was when it learned about Dimona — and yet how circumspect Washington was in its reaction to the discovery. There was a huge gap between what senior U.S. officials said to each other about Dimona and what they said to the Israelis. On the one hand, the Americans were convinced that the evidence they had amassed indicated that it was plutonium production-oriented project with weapons potential that posed a significant proliferation risk. They were irritated that the Israelis were trying to pull the wool over their eyes with all manner of evasive answers and misleading stories. Apparently they had many doubts about Ben-Gurion’s new cover story as well. On the other hand, the administration masked its anger and suspicions; opting for a cautious approach, it chose not to be confrontational but to confine itself largely to: 1) seeking answers about Dimona and Israel’s intentions, and 2) encouraging Israel to accept visits by U.S. scientists and consent to applying International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards to Dimona, as a way to constrain Israeli freedom of action. There are hints that U.S. diplomats warned the Israelis that U.S. economic aid could be jeopardized, but with only weeks left in office the Eisenhower administration was in no position to coerce its ally over the issue.

***

This and the three other photographs of the construction site near Dinoma in the Negev desert for Israel’s then-secret nuclear reactor were taken during the last months of 1960. According to the U.S. Intelligence Board post-mortem (See Document 27A), the British and U.S. military attachés took photos and these could be from either source. The plainly visible reactor dome undermined Israeli claims that a textile factory was under construction. These images of the reactor site, some of them originally classified secret or confidential, are located in State Department records at the National Archives. (Record Group 59, Records of the Special Assistant to the Secretary of State for Atomic Energy and Outer Space, General Records Relating to Atomic Energy, 1948-62, box 501, Country File Z1.50 Israel f. Reactors 1960)

President Eisenhower and Israel Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion during the latter’s visit in March 1960 to the United States. (Source: www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org)

Henry Gomberg, Professor of Nuclear Engineering at the University of Michigan, shown at the laboratory during the 1950s, several years before his fall November 1960 trip to Israel where he made discoveries about the Dimona reactor (photo courtesy of Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor).

Under Secretary of State Robert Murphy swearing in Ogden Reid, the newly-appointed U.S. ambassador to Israel, 7 June 1959 (photo from NARA Still Pictures Division, RG 59 SO).

Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs G. Lewis Jones, who wrote to Ambassador Reid that “it was stupid” of the Israelis to undertake the secret reactor project. (photo from NARA Still Pictures Division, RG 59 SO).

Addy Cohen (at the left) with Teddy Kollek, Director General of the Prime Minister’s Office and later, Mayor of Jerusalem.

To appreciate the full historical context of the American intelligence failure we need to say a little bit about the Dimona project itself. In 1955, soon after David Ben-Gurion came back to power as Israel’s prime minister and minister of defense, he launched a secret feasibility initiative to determine whether, and how, Israel could build a nuclear infrastructure to support a program aiming at producing nuclear explosives. Ben-Gurion delegated that difficult task to a young (32 years of age) and highly ambitious lieutenant, Shimon Peres, whose formal position was then the director general of the Ministry of Defense. Within three years, from 1955 to 1958, Peres did almost the impossible: he managed to transform the idea of a national nuclear program from a vague vision of the future into a real technological project in the making.

Unlike the chair of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC), Professor David Ernst Bergmann, who preached self-reliance, Peres’s overall philosophy was that Israel must not (and cannot) reinvent the wheel and therefore must find a foreign supplier who could provide the most comprehensive nuclear package possible, one suited for a weapons-oriented program.[1]

Those three years were filled with internal deliberations, debates and planning. Often different courses of action were examined simultaneously, on parallel or even conflicting tracks. At least three countries were considered at one time or another to be the foreign supplier: the United States, France, Norway and, to a limited extent, the United Kingdom. In historical perspective, it appears that by 1958, the project’s international master plan had become firmly drawn: France would be the foreign supplier, Norway would provide the heavy water and possibly the backup in case the French card went wrong, and the United States would provide a small peaceful package, under “Atoms of Peace,” that could serve as the camouflage for the whole project, mostly as a way to conceal Israel’s real achievement — Dimona — from the United States.

This raises the issue of secrecy. The story of Dimona is one of a huge secret. Secrecy was essential in order to shield and insulate the highly vulnerable, newly born, project from a hostile outside. At the very core, of course, it is an Israeli secret – the largest, most comprehensive and longest-held secret Israel has ever generated. However, it is more than an Israeli secret; Israel had partners in this venture. The prime partner was the chief foreign supplier, France; the second was Norway, in concert with the British.

And then there was the United States. In a sense, the secrecy surrounding Dimona was aimed primarily against the United States. After all, of all the nations involved, the U.S. posed the greatest threat to the Israeli program. Since the time of the Baruch Plan in 1946 the United States had been on the record opposing the spread of nuclear weapons. Washington helped to create the IAEA in 1957 — the very same year the Dimona deal was signed — and since then it had promoted the creation of an international safeguards system. Should the Dimona secret have been compromised, the United States would have likely exercised pressure on France either to terminate the project altogether or at least to submit it to international safeguards.

The documents in this e-book involve Israel’s nuclear relations with the United States, France and Norway. What follows is some brief background on Israel’s efforts with each of them:

The United States. On 12 July 1955, Israel was the second country to sign a general agreement with the United States for peaceful nuclear cooperation under “Atoms for Peace.” Initially, the leaders of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission [IAEC] thought that American assistance could be the starting point for a largely indigenous Israeli nuclear program. Consistent with this vision, during 1955-56, IAEC Chairman Bergmann tried to find out whether the United States would provide assistance to build a “real reactor” — that is, a 10 MW natural uranium/heavy water reactor — but also to provide 10 tons of heavy water. Bergman made a formal request in July 1956 through a letter to AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss. In September the AEC notified Israel that it could be done but only under the aegis of a new bilateral nuclear power agreement which would require a more rigorous safeguards agreement than the original 1955 bilateral research accord. When Israel asked why, it was told that “plutonium production capabilities” necessitated stricter controls. When it became apparent the United States would insist on strict safeguards, Israel dropped its probe altogether.A year later, however, in 1957, Israel returned to the original U.S. “Atoms for Peace” offer to construct a small 1 MW swimming pool-type reactor, to be designed and installed by American Machines and Foundry (AMF) Atomics. The contract was signed on 20 March 1957 and in December of that year the long-awaited proposal was submitted to the USAEC by AMF on behalf of Israel for the Nachal Soreq (Rubin) site. Finally, on 19 March 1958, Israel signed a contract with AMF, expecting that the reactor startup date would be 15 months later. Construction on the Soreq site had begun in January 1958 and the small reactor reached criticality in a public ceremony in June 1960, six months prior to the discovery of Dimona.[2]Unlike Dimona, however, the Soreq (“Atoms for Peace”) reactor became subject to IAEA safeguards beginning in the mid-1960s.

France. By early 1956, as French-Israeli military relations intensified, Peres became convinced that France could evolve into Israel’s foreign nuclear supplier and acted accordingly. But it was the nationalization of the Suez Canal that summer which created the political opening for a French-Israeli nuclear deal. In September 1956 the French Atomic Energy Commission and the IAEC reached an agreement in principle for the sale of a small EL type research reactor to Israel. A month later, as a side issue at the end of the secret Sevres conference (October 22-24) (site of the “collusion” that led to the Suez campaign), the nuclear deal received top-level political approval. The 1956 deal, however, was quite limited in size and scope; it also did not include a chemical separation plant and related reprocessing technology.It was in the context of the Suez campaign itself, when all three participants were subject to Soviet nuclear threats, that France reinforced its own earlier (1954) decision to become a nuclear power and agreed to help Israel to do the same. With France making its own nuclear decisions it became easier for Peres to be more explicit about the package that Israel actually wanted. The small EL-102 reactor that the CEA had planned for Israel in the fall of 1956 — similar to the experimental EL3 18 MW in Sacly — was upgraded to a large plutonium-producing reactor of generally the same order as the G-1 reactor at Marcoule. Following a year of highly intense discussions and negotiations in France, on 30 October 1957 Peres finally signed the Dimona package, which included both hardware and technological aid. In the wake of widespread rumors of French-Israeli nuclear cooperation in early 1958, U.S. embassy officials reported that Israel had plans to build an “experimental” reactor but the State Department did not investigate this further (See Documents 1A–B).[3]

Norway. Beginning in 1955, Israeli AEC Chair Bergmann pressed his government to obtain 20 tons of heavy water cheaply and, if possible, without safeguards. Outside the United States, the Norwegian company Norsk Hydro was the only available producer of heavy water. In early 1956, Israel made a request to the United States but also approached Norway, informally via political channels, as to whether and when it could supply Israel with 20 tons of heavy water. Norway’s initial reply was that, due to current orders, it would be impossible to do so before the end of 1960. When the approach to Washington became hopeless, Israel grew more interested in the Norwegian supply. In August 1956, Bergmann wrote his friend Gunnar Randers, the director of the Norwegian Institute of for Atomic Energy, with a formal request to purchase 10 tons of heavy water. Randers responded noncommittally: supply was short but there was a “good chance” for a deal later on.Negotiations between Israel and Norway intensified in 1957-58, at the time that the Dimona deal was negotiated and signed. In a letter Randers wrote in August 1957 to Fredrik Moller, the director of NORATOM, a newly established company aimed at promoting the Norwegian nuclear industry, he explained that Israel needed the heavy water for a 40 MW “production reactor” fueled by natural uranium. As there were political and logistic difficulties with the Israeli order, to make it more attractive Randers presented it in the context of a larger nuclear cooperation agreement between NORATOM and the IAEC. In addition, to expedite the deal it became a three-party transaction: Israel purchased heavy water from NORATOM that had been sold and transferred two years earlier to Britain, but became surplus for them. The heavy water was shipped directly from the UK to Israel, without safeguards, as the issue of safeguards was left to the Norwegians. The paper record indicates that Randers was willing to be “creative” on controls, but the Norwegian Foreign Ministry insisted on safeguards to ascertain “peaceful use.” After long discussions Israel gave up on the question of safeguards and on 25 February 1959 the two countries exchanged documents on the heavy water sale with provisions to ensure that the use was peaceful. A few months later the Norwegian Foreign Ministry informed a U.S. AEC representative about the bilateral agreement, assuring him that it included safeguards and inspection rights (See Documents 2, 20).[4]

The discoveries of the French and Norwegian roles in the Israeli nuclear project were a revelation to the Eisenhower administration but it was even more surprised to discover that it already had in its possession clues that had not been followed up until it was too late. The documents below demonstrate how, during the short time it had available, the Eisenhower administration scrambled to pull the threads together by conducting an intelligence “post-mortem.” (See Document 27A). The post-mortem treated the missed opportunities as unfortunate but innocent errors caused by the deficient sharing of information and poor follow-up of instructions. But there have been more conspiratorial explanations of the missed opportunities: for example, the view that pro-Israeli officials in the AEC, CIA, and other agencies stove-piped important reports and information, and the open question that President Eisenhower himself may have chosen to look the other way during 1958-1959.[5]

A more delicate and complex dilemma faced by the Eisenhower administration was how to respond both publicly and privately to the challenge to U.S.-Israeli and U.S.-French relations posed by Dimona. Specifically, the administration had to decide how tough it should be and how to balance the Israeli proliferation concern against the rest of the U.S.-Israeli relationship. It is important to keep in mind that the administration was becoming aware of two things: (a) that Israel had made deliberate efforts to keep Dimona secret for as long as possible; and (b) that Washington could hardly take on faith the new Israeli “cover story” about Dimona, including Ben-Gurion’s public and private assurances. The administration remained skeptical, if not suspicious.

The possible public disclosure of Dimona also placed Israel, and specifically Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, in a dilemma: How should it react to the disclosure? How much should Israel tell and how truthful should it be? Could Israel tell the U.S. government one thing in private and something else to the world? The question was whether Israel should choose the path of truth or the path of ambiguity and deception. Because the first public statement would have great impact, this was a truly fateful decision. The internal Israeli deliberations about what to say are still unavailable, but it is possible to reconstruct the underlying reasoning based on important public and private statements made by Israeli officials, including Ben-Gurion.

Ben-Gurion chose the path of ambiguity and concealment: he declared that Dimona was purely a civilian scientific project, for training in the use of nuclear power for economic development. It was “exclusively for peaceful purposes,” he declared in his Knesset statement on 21 December 1960. In his private assurances to the United States Ben-Gurion provided some new information, but it was entirely consistent with his public version.[6] He would not tell the whole truth because the fate of the project was at stake. For Ben-Gurion this ambiguous, if not entirely deceitful, strategy had obvious short-term benefits: lessening U.S. anger and resulting pressure, and thereby avoiding a public showdown with Washington, while also calming the situation at home and in the region generally.[7]

It is apparent that the Eisenhower administration had no appetite to call Ben-Gurion’s bluff (either in private or in public). Nor was the departing president interested in escalating the Dimona problem into a diplomatic confrontation, which would not have even been possible given , with all that was already on his agenda (the Laos and Berlin crises, for example). Because relations with Israel had been relatively good, Israel had significant domestic support within the United States, and, perhaps most significantly, the Eisenhower administration was in its last few days in office, the White House let the State Department deal with the issue, keeping it under diplomatic control until the new Kennedy administration took office.

A determination to avoid a crisis encouraged senior officials such as Assistant Secretary of State G. Lewis Jones [Document 19] to try to “calm down” the agencies, including CIA, which he believed had been reacting intemperately, and to ensure that no one tried to cut off aid to Israel. At the same time, “calm”, secrecy, and the avoidance of publicity might make it possible for Washington to get answers from the Israeli and put quiet pressure on them to open up Dimona to visits by U.S. scientists and to accept safeguards by the IAEA (in fact, the last thing Ben-Gurion and his associates were likely to accept).

The dilemma the Eisenhower administration faced after the discovery of Dimona in December 1960-January 1961 would endure for the entire decade. From then on, three successive U.S. administrations — under presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon — would have to deal with it as well. President Kennedy chose the toughest path of struggle and confrontation in his effort to check the program; President Johnson realized that the U.S. had limited leverage on the issue and planted the seeds of compromise and looking the other way; finally, in a bargain with Prime Minister Golda Meir, President Nixon accepted the Israel’s de facto nuclear status as long as it stayed secret, and in doing so created the present dilemma.

The documents that follow are illuminating but more is to be learned. Many records remain classified in the National Archives, not only in State Department files but also those of the Atomic Energy Commission. The papers of AEC Chairman John McCone at the National Archives include a file on Israel which is the subject of an earlier declassification request along with related State Department files. Moreover, the National Security Archive has pending requests with the Department of Energy, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library. In response to a request to re-review SNIE 100-8-60 (See Document 8), the CIA has held the line, refusing to release more information. The request is now under appeal.

Some in the U.S. intelligence community[8] regarded these communications as an early missed opportunity to discover the Dimona project a year or two earlier. In March 1958, in light of growing concern about the possibility of surreptitious nuclear weapons programs, the State Department saw an “urgent” need for information on the Israeli atomic energy program and asked its Tel Aviv embassy to report on “all phases” of Israeli nuclear-related activities, research and development, including any exchanges with foreign governments and organizations. As an example, the instruction cited a recent press report in the Jerusalem Post on French-Israeli atomic cooperation. The report included statements by the French minister of foreign affairs, Francois Benard, that France was supplying Israel’s uranium needs in exchange for “Israeli discoveries in atomic research for peace.”

In response the embassy set up a meeting on 15 April 1958 between embassy Second Secretary Lewis Townsend and Professor David Ernest Bergmann, the chairman of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission. With respect to cooperation with France, Bergmann asserted flatly that Minister Benard “did not know what he was talking about.” Bergmann acknowledged that Israel had a nuclear agreement with France but the exchanges under the agreement were informational only. Under the agreement Israel received from France “unpublished reports” and sent students to study at French nuclear centers. He noted that the agreement had no provision under which France was obligated to supply Israel uranium as had been reported; nor had Israel ever received such supply. The substance of Bergmann’s commentary was close to what a US AEC representative would hear in Paris more than two years later in a similar inquiry (see Document 4). The comments were quite accurate as far as that (unpublished) 1954 bi-lateral exchange agreement was concerned (Bergmann mentioned that there was also a tri-lateral agreement on atomic energy research between Israel, France and the UK). Israel did not advertise the existence of those agreements, but did not treat them as classified either.[9]

Not surprisingly, however, Bergmann made no reference to the extremely secret French-Israeli Dimona agreement which had been signed in Paris on 3 October 1957. One must assume that he must have known something about that deal but it is not clear how much knew given that the IAEC was hardly consulted, let alone involved, in the decisions and actions that led to Dimona.[10] Bergmann’s most intriguing comment came at the end when he said that the principal decision to build a “power reactor had already been taken.” He seems to suggest two stages: first, “plans” which are currently “contemplated” to construct an “experimental nuclear reactor” within two or two-and-a-half years, and then five to seven years later “a large economically feasible [power] reactor could be put into operation.”

Was the reference to that “experimental reactor” an oblique reference to Dimona — as indeed Israel initially presented it — or was it a deliberate effort to confuse his American interlocutor? Or perhaps it was a mix of both? It is worth noting that Bergmann was known among Israelis as being loose on secrecy and this was apparently one of the reasons why he was bypassed on the Dimona project.[11]

In retrospect, according to the post-mortem investigation (see Document 27A) on why the United States discovered Dimona two years late, Bergmann’s loose comment on the “experimental reactor” was one of those major missing hints. In April 1958 U.S. intelligence wrongly assumed that the reference to the “experimental reactor” was to the US small swimming pool reactor at Soreq whose construction started in January that year at Nachal Soreq (see Document 3). Moreover, U.S. intelligence took on faith Bergmann’s statement about the limited nature of French-Israeli nuclear cooperation, although there had already been some reports about possible French-Israeli secret nuclear cooperation, even the possibility of joint nuclear weapons research. One way or another, a chance to investigate Bergmann’s claims and to seek further information about the “experimental reactor” was lost.

The numbers on the right side of these documents indicate that they are from the State Department’s central decimal files (whereby documents were filed using numerical combinations denoting subjects and countries). The 900 category signifies communications, transportation, and science; 84A stands for Israel; and 801 indicates research and development. The filing of the document in the R&D category, instead of the usual 1901 category for nuclear energy matters, would have hindered any U.S. government official who was interested in tracing intelligence on the Israeli nuclear program.

C: Richard Kerry to Philip Farley, 7 August 1959, enclosing copy of letter to Robert Brandin, and “Memorandum of conversation of August 6, 1959, at the Atomic Energy Institute, Kjeller, Norway,” Secret

A critical piece of information that was known to the State Department, but for obscure reasons remained unknown to the U.S. intelligence community for many months (see Document 22), was the 20 tons of heavy water that Norway had quietly sold to Israel upon an agreement signed in Oslo on 25 February 1959. The Norwegians claimed that they wanted to keep the transaction under wraps because disclosure could hurt their diplomatic standing and interfere with business prospects in the Middle East. Evidently, Israel had equally strong reasons of her own to keep the heavy water deal secret as well. For this reason, but also due to an availability issue, Norway used the U.K. as a key third party in the deal: NORATOM (the Norwegian state-sponsored company to promote Norwegian nuclear energy industry) had originally sold heavy water to the United Kingdom for its nuclear weapons program. Then, as part of the three-party arrangement, the Norwegians asked the British to resell their excess heavy water back to NORATOM; even though the product would be shipped directly from the United Kingdom to Israel, it was NORATOM that was selling it. This also enabled NORATOM to avoid the political difficulty of having to apply to the Norwegian government for an export license.[12]

According to Olaf Solli, a nuclear energy expert with the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, some British officials wanted to “inform” Washington of the Israeli heavy water deal, but ultimately London did not share the information, according to British press reports in 2005 and 2006 based on new declassifications in British archives.[13]

In any event, on 5 June 1959, the Norwegian Foreign Ministry informed AEC official William M. Fullerton, a division chief at the Office of International Affairs, about the agreement to sell heavy water to Israel — subject to “safeguards and inspections” — but the size of the transaction was not reported. The U.S Embassy in Oslo prepared the memo of conversation and some days later, on 15 June, embassy political officer Richard Kerry forwarded it to Philip J. Farley, the assistant to the secretary of state for disarmament and atomic energy, asking that Fullerton and his boss, Algie Wells, receive copies.

For unknown reasons the memo was lost in the shuffle and was not disseminated above the middle levels of the State Department and the AEC. Top Department officials, not to mention those at the CIA or from State Department intelligence, did not see that June 1959 memo until December 1960, although months before the CIA had learned there had been a deal.[14] Accordingly, the questions about the sale that could have been asked of the Israelis, the Norwegians, and the British were not.

In a follow-up conversation, Richard Kerry learned more, indirectly, about the political sensitivity of Norwegian secret deals with Israel from Gunnar Randers, the director of the Atomic Energy Institute, and the key figure in Norwegian nuclear policy after World War II. Referring to NORATOM’s negotiations with the Egyptians over “isotope work,” Randers saw a “delicate” situation concerning transactions with Israel, but as long as they did not reach the public the Norwegians would not face any “difficulties” from Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Randers was a close friend of the IAEC chair, David Bergmann, and this story supported Israel’s need for secrecy but it also suited Randers who had not kept the upper levels of the Norwegian Foreign Ministry in the picture (seeDocument 20).

American Machine and Foundry (AMF) Atomics was the company which installed for Israel the 1 MW swimming pool type light water nuclear reactor at Nachal Soreq (known today as the Soreq Nuclear Research Center) that Israel received as a gift from the U.S. under the1955 “Atoms for Peace” bilateral agreement. In late July 1960, U.S. Embassy officials learned from a conversation with D. Anderson, an AMF employee, that French personnel were involved in building “a 60 megawatt atomic power reactor” in the Beersheba area. Anderson stated that this was his “impression, gained on conversations he had with an Israeli, Daniel Kimhi, the director of the Naptha Petroleum Company. According to Kimhi, the French nationals were working on a project described to him as ‘gas cooled power reactor capable of producing approximately 60 megawatts of electrical power.'” Anderson’s understanding was that the project had been under way for “about two years” with the completion date two years off.

As of this writing, this document is the first and earliest available declassified US document that makes explicit reference to the Dimona project. We should note that at the National Archives (College Park), over one hundred additional documents from 1960-1961 remain classified in the decimal files. A declassification request for them is pending.

The embassy reported this conversation to Washington and asked that the U.S. embassy in Paris look into the French government’s role, if any, in the alleged development. It took a few weeks before this information went to nuclear energy intelligence experts in Washington (at the AEC and CIA) who came to realize that they had missed other pieces of intelligence (See Document 27A) and began looking more closely at what was going on at the Dimona site.

Documents 4A-B: “The French CEA Was Not Collaborating with the Israelis”

A: State Department Instruction CA-3636 to U.S. Embassy Paris, “Reported Atomic Reactor Power Project at Beersheba,” 19 October 1960, confidential

B: U.S. Embassy Paris Airgram G-766 to State Department, 22 November 1960, Confidential

Sources: A: Record Group 84, Records of Foreign Service Posts, Classified Records of the U.S. Mission to the International Atomic Energy Agency, 1955-1963, box 1, Atomic Energy Developments Israel 1959-61; B: Freedom of Information release

When the U.S intelligence community got wind of the Tel Aviv embassy report on the French-Israeli reactor project (see Document 2), it took time to digest it; U.S. officials realized that more information was needed because apparently they had no independent sources to corroborate the report. (It is still a puzzle whether, and to what extent, U-2 overhead photographs were especially telling or whether they were being distributed within the intelligence community.)[15] According to the post-mortem (see Document 27A, PDF page 23), the CIA formulated a list of technical questions about French-Israeli collaboration, including the organizations involved in the project, reactor specifications, and plans for spent fuel, e.g. whether the Israelis were building a chemical separation plant. The State Department sent the CIA questions as an “Instruction” to the U.S. embassy in Israel, with the embassy in Paris and the U.S. mission to the IAEA also receiving copies. The request for information did not get high priority; it had a “Routine collection priority.”

If the U.S. embassy in Israel ever sent back a formal response, it is still classified. But U.S. military attaches at the Embassy in Tel Aviv did begin collecting information and sent photographs back to Washington. Another attempt to ferret out information is known: John Rouleau, the AEC’s representative in Paris, tried, but he met with complete denial from an unnamed member of the French Atomic Energy Commission. The latter, according to Rouleau’s account, “stated flatly that the French CEA was not collaborating with the Israelis in the construction of a nuclear power reactor.” Furthermore, the official denied that any French company could be working with the Israelis on a power reactor because “prior permission from the CEA would be required and such permission has neither been requested nor granted.”

While the French official denied any bilateral cooperation with Israel on a power reactor, he acknowledged the existence of an earlier 1954 agreement between the two national atomic energy commissions under which the bodies collaborated in two specific areas: (1) heavy water production and (2) extracting uranium from phosphates. In retrospect, it is impossible to say whether the CEA interlocutor truly knew nothing about the Dimona project-the Israeli-French deal was highly compartmentalized and secret within the CEA-or whether he made a deliberate effort to mislead the United States. Strictly speaking, however, his statement was not a lie because the Dimona reactor was not a power reactor.

Memorandum of conversation, “Safeguards for Reactors,” 25 November 1960, Secret

Source: National Archives (College Park), Record Group 59, Department of State Records (hereinafter RG 59), Records of Special Assistant to the Secretary of State for Atomic Energy and Outer Space, Records Relating to Atomic Energy Matters, 1948-1962, box 305, 12H P.U.S File: 18. Safeguards September-December 1960 [Part 2 of 3]

Despite the lack of cooperation from the French government, Washington was piecing together information about the site in the Negev Desert from a variety of intelligence sources. By 25 November, Secretary of State Herter was confident enough in the information accumulated so far to share its essence with British Ambassador Harold Caccia. While intelligence experts in London and Washington had already been consulting each other (see chronology with Document 27A), Herter took it to a higher level by telling Caccia that Washington had unconfirmed reports that a “plutonium-producing reactor may be being built in Israel with French aid.” Furthermore, France may be giving the Israelis the “know how” to build “crude atomic bombs.” What made the existence of the Israeli reactor project of special concern was that for months Washington and its allies had been trying to build a consensus at the IAEA in favor of effective safeguards on nuclear power plants; this “new factor emphasized the importance of providing adequate atomic energy safeguards.”

Flying back to Ann Arbor on his way back from Israel, Professor Henry Gomberg, on the faculty of the University of Michigan’s nuclear engineering department, briefly stopped in Paris on 25 November and met with Roleau. As a guest of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission and a consultant on matters of nuclear education, Gomberg had picked up some “urgent and secret” pieces of information — and suspicions — about the Israeli nuclear program that he wanted to share with U.S. government officials. He tantalized Rouleau by holding back what he had learned, but the little he said implied that Israel, with French aid, was engaged in some sort of a large scale secret nuclear power project. Gomberg also noted that he learned from an unnamed personal friend of Ben-Gurion [he probably meant Dr. Bergmann] that within a few weeks Israel would announce a five year [atomic energy] plan and would disclose the construction at the Beersheba site.

Several days later, on 1 December, Gomberg came to Washington for a full debriefing of AEC and State Department representatives. His name is redacted from this release of the memorandum of that conversation (declassified in the early 1990s) but it is evident that Gomberg was the subject of the debriefing. The same is true of the subsequent CIA report dated 9 February which also masked Gomberg’s identity. This document, apparently based on an interview at the time of Gomberg’s visit, contains detailed information, including his observations and tentative conclusions.

Based on various meetings in Israel, Gomberg became convinced that the large site the Israelis had described as an “agricultural experiment station” was actually a “large classified project.” It was evident to him that all his Israeli interlocutors were “thoroughly briefed to restrict their discussion within security bounds,” and yet his discussions at the Technion led him to believe that the Israelis were creating a much larger and more thorough nuclear training program than was needed by their own declared programs. He got a similar impression in his discussions at the Weizmann Institute (Plant [Machon] #4) where one person distressed his guide by mentioning that Plant [Machon] #4 was expected “to be working with gram quantities of Plutonium and curie quantities of polonium.” The plutonium issue was probably the most sensitive matter for the Israelis because of its weapons implications.

Gomberg concluded that the classified project was probably “a large nuclear and electrical power plant,” whose construction had been underway for some three years, located east of Beersheba. In another part of his report he described the reactor as “far beyond any kind of a training reactor and it will be capable of producing weapons grade plutonium.” Gomberg noted that he believed the Israelis had the technical capability to construct and operate a nuclear plant up to the level of 200 MW thermal. Then he estimated that the power level of the Beersheba project would be approximately 250 MW thermal. Later Gomberg noted that US photographs that were shown to him indicated a very close resemblance to the French G-1 reactor in Marcoule.

In his last meeting with Dr. Bergmann, Gomberg pressed him for information about “activities which were not freely discussed”; the latter acknowledged that the original intention was to announce the Beersheba facility later in 1961, but that because of the many rumors Ben-Gurion would make an announcement about a power reactor project in about three weeks time.

While the U.S. intelligence community was finalizing its estimate of the secret Israeli reactor, senior officials had already discussed the problem and what to do about it at a luncheon meeting of the Operations Coordinating Board, which served as the coordinating and implementing unit for President Eisenhower’s National Security Council system. After Gordon Gray, the president’s national security assistant, opened the discussion, Deputy Under Secretary of State Livingston Merchant emphasized the subject’s “political sensitivity” and cautioned against any comments that cast doubt upon an anticipated Israeli announcement, even though it was generally agreed that the Israeli “cover story would not be successful for long.” This was probably a reference to the description of the plant as a “power reactor.” In the entire matter, “the Department of State would be the sole spokesman.” A skeptical reader, possibly Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs G. Lewis Jones, wrote “Ha!” next to the “sole spokesman” comment because Jones believed that too many other agencies “wanted to get into the act” (see Jones letter to Reid with Document 19 below).

Document 8: “Plutonium Production for Weapons Is At least One Major Purpose

Special National Intelligence Estimate Number 100-8-60, “Implications of the Acquisition by Israel of a Nuclear Weapons Capability,” 8 December 1960, with Memoranda to Holders Attached, 22 and 29 December 1960, attached, Secret, Excised copy

On the basis of intelligence collected during the summer and fall of 1960 (of which much remains classified), possibly including the most recent information from Henry Gomberg, on 8 December 1958 Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles signed off on a Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE) entitled “Implications of the Acquisition by Israel of a Nuclear Weapons Capability.” The U.S. Intelligence Board, whose member agencies participated in the drafting process, concurred in the estimate that same day. The SNIE began with a firm factual determination that “Israel is engaged in construction of a nuclear reactor complex in the Negev near Beersheba.” Acknowledging that there could be various ways to interpret the function of the Dimona complex, the authors believed that “on the basis of all available evidence” that “plutonium production for weapons is at least one major purpose of this effort.” The “surrounding” secrecy and Dimona’s remote location was strong evidence of the military purposes. The SNIE estimated “that Israel will produce some weapons grade plutonium in 1963-64 and possibly as early as 1962.”

France’s extensive aid was noted but the exact nature of the assistance, including details on the reactor, and whether, and to what extent, the complex also included plutonium extraction (reprocessing), has been excised from this version of the SNIE. Also excised is the information mentioned in several subsequent updates (“Memorandum to Holders” on 22 and 29 December 1960). The Norwegian heavy water sale to Israel was noted — the CIA had discovered the purchase earlier in the year — but whether the State Department had rediscovered its documentation on the transaction by this point is not clear.

The SNIE also included a detailed discussion of the broader implications of the Dimona reactor: what it said about French and Israeli motivations, the possible reactions by the Arab world and the Soviet bloc, as well as the overall “repercussions” among western allies.

The SNIE became controversial as soon as it was published because senior intelligence officials were learning that the intelligence agencies and other U.S. government organizations had collected telling evidence several years earlier indicating that Israel had a secret nuclear reactor program under way. This recognition led to the production of an intelligence post-mortem to look at what had been missed and why (See Document 27A).

Document 9:Memorandum of Discussion at the 470th Meeting of the National Security Council, December 8, 1960, Top Secret, excised copy

The day that the SNIE was issued, the National Security Council met, with Eisenhower presiding, and received a briefing on the estimate by Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles who passed around photos of Dimona taken by the U.S. Army attaché. Dulles began by noting that Israel was constructing, with French assistance, a nuclear complex in the Negev. The complex contained a reactor capable of “producing weapons-grade plutonium.” His initial statement included three more lines which are still classified. As to the French assistance, it included equipment, personnel and training, as well as “fuel elements.” Neither CIA nor the AEC believed, contrary to Israel’s anticipated statement that the project was “solely for peaceful purposes.” Secretary of State Herter noted that the Arab reaction to the discovery would be “severe.” (At that point four-and-a-half lines of Herter’s comment are classified.) He also claimed that the cost of the reactor might be 40 to 80 million dollars.

During the discussion of the nuclear proliferation implications of an Israeli weapons program, the conversation briefly turned to how the plant was financed. Under Secretary of the Treasury Fred Scribner suggested that an important funding source may have been “Jewish charitable organizations in the U.S.” which received tax-deductible contributions. This had caused past problems because some charitable funds had been “diverted to government operations in Israel.”

The still-classified portions of this meeting record are the subject of a mandatory declassification review request filed in 2014.

Telephone Call Logs of Secretary of State Christian Herter, 9 December 1960, Unclassified

Source: Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Christian Herter Papers

On 9 December, Secretary of State Herter summoned Israeli ambassador Avraham Harman to the State Department and showed him photos of the Dimona reactor, asking for an explanation that would remove “bases for concern.” Harman said he knew nothing of the project but would inform his government. Later that afternoon, Herter called Claude Lebel, the chargé d’affaires at the French embassy, and asked about French involvement in the project. Herter prefaced his question by referring to a report he had received from his embassy in Tel Aviv that Prime Minister Ben-Gurion was about to announce that a new experimental reactor had been built in the Negev with French aid. Herter noted that, according to information the United States had ascertained, Israel had been involved since 1958 in constructing a reactor “which is at least ten times as large as claimed,” and that the design appeared to be not for power but for plutonium production, hence, it would provide Israel “considerable weapons potential.” Furthermore, Herter noted that the cost of the reactor was between 40 to 80 million dollars. Lebel had no information to offer and promised to pass the query on to Paris.

Source: RG 59. Records of the Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, Office of the Country Director for Israel and Arab-Israeli Affairs, Records Relating to Israel, 1964-1966, box 8, Israel Atomic Energy Program

A week later, Herter was in Paris for a NATO meeting where he met with his French counterpart, Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville. The latter directly acknowledged the secret French-Israeli deal to build a “replica of [the] Marcoule plant.” Under the agreement, Couve de Murville added, France would supply the raw materials and receive any plutonium produced by the plant. The Israelis would not make any public statement without first consulting the French government. In reply to Herter’s question about how the plant was financed, Couve stated that he “assumed the money came from US.” Herter understood that comment to mean that the project was financed by the “diversion of US government or private [American] aid.”

With AEC Chairman John McCone slated to appear on “Meet the Press,” AEC and State Department officials met to develop an integrated approach to ensure that what he said comported with the government’s over-all position. The officials developed an approach that he could follow “with dignity” and not “be drawn into implications” that the U.S. was associated with an alleged Israeli nuclear weapons program. With respect to earlier press reports from London about an Israeli atomic bomb project, McCone would not comment. He could say that the U.S. opposed the proliferation of nuclear weapons capabilities, and that it was “firmly established policy” that “our law does not permit us to assist other countries to develop” such capabilities, If questioned, McCone could acknowledge U.S. support for Israeli research under the “Atoms for Peace” program.

In his comments on “Meet the Press,” McCone took his own approach; his main disclosure was an acknowledgement that the Israelis had not “revealed” the reactor to the U.S. He further stated that Washington was trying to get more information, that the existence of the reactor did not necessarily mean a bomb project, although the reactor could produce plutonium, and that Israeli compliance with IAEA safeguards would provide a good test case for inspection and “allay fear of weapons intent.”[16]

Documents 13A-B: “Israel Should Forthwith Open the Plants”

A: White House Office of the Staff Secretary, “Memorandum of Conference with the President December 19, 1960”, 12 January 1961, Secret, Excised Copy

With the Washington Post and the New York Times publishing stories about Dimona, partly based on leaks by John McCone,[17] President Eisenhower convened his top aides to discuss the Israeli reactor, how to respond to the publicity, and what kind of a public stance it was appropriate to take. This record of a meeting between Eisenhower and his closest advisers was probably not the president’s first discussion of the discovery of Dimona and its implications, but it was probably the highest level formal gathering and the most wide-ranging discussion. The conference record reveals some remarkable points:

Purpose of the Dimona Complex and Reliability of US knowledge : Secretary of Defense Thomas S. Gates pointed out that “our information is that the plant is not for peaceful uses.” The President’s science advisor, Dr. George Kistiakowsky, responded that “there is some doubt about this” because it is unclear whether a chemical separation is on site (or being constructed). AEC Chairman McCone responded that his people believed that “there is a chemical separation plant there.” He added that it would make no sense that the Israelis would do just “part of the job.” This issue, whether Dimona had or did not have a secret separation plant, would haunt the US intelligence community for at least a decade. In retrospect, Gates and McCone were right from the start.

Cost and US financial Involvement: McCone observed that the Dimona plant “had probably been financed from US support to Israel” and Herter supported the claim, adding that “it is clear that they [the Israelis] have constructed this plant through diversions from private and public [US] aid to Israel.” Eisenhower himself noted that “we had evidence” that the project cost was in a range between $100 and $200 million. (Incidentally, these figures are more than double the figure Herter cited at the National Security Council meeting a week earlier.) The president added, “we do not know where they have obtained the funds,” but the US government has a strong interest in knowing “because of the aid we are giving them.” Eisenhower’s remark is one of the rare mentions of a financial estimate for the Dimona project.

Inspection: When McCone urged that the U.S. insist the Dimona plant be under IAEA safeguards, Gates suggested that the Israelis be asked to open the plant for inspection because Israel had signed the agreement that established the IAEA. Eisenhower agreed: the US statement should express confidence that because Israel was an IAEA member and had claimed that the reactor was for peaceful uses, it should allow inspections. When national security assistant Gordon Gray asked whether the US would insist on visiting the site, Eisenhower replied that it would not be necessary if the US was successful in forcing IAEA inspections.

Intentions and Concealment: CIA Director Allen Dulles noted that Israel was trying to create confusion by associating the Dimona plant, “which is a large production installation,” with the very small Soreq reactor built with U.S. aid.

The meeting ended with the decision that Dimona should be handled by the Department of State, not the White House. Since the issue had emerged in the very last weeks of the Eisenhower presidency it was apparent the White House could not set a lasting policy but if any public statement was to be made it was to be coordinated with Herter. Nevertheless, for Eisenhower, the key objective was for the government of Israeli to accept IAEA inspections on the plant so that they could demonstrate its peaceful purposes.

During the meeting Herter had said that a U.S. statement should “remove [us] from suspicion” because Washington was not complicit in Dimona. Thus, the public statement made later that day noted the press reports about the reactor and “welcomed” Israel’s assurance that the government had “no intention of producing nuclear weapons.” The U.S. had provided no assistance because that would be contrary to U.S. nonproliferation policy and the Atomic Energy Act. The U.S. was concerned about the Israeli project and had asked Ambassador Harman for information. “A response has not been received.”

On 20 December Herter met with Ambassador Harman for the second time to discuss Dimona. At this meeting Harman answered Herter’s earlier questions by providing a narrative that became Israel’s basic cover story: Yes, Israel was building an additional reactor in the Negev with 24 megawatt capacity, meaning, but it had “no industrial importance.” The purpose of the Dimona reactor was “the development of scientific knowledge for eventual industrial, agricultural, medical and other scientific purposes, as an interim step toward enabling Israel to build its own power reactors.” The project “would take some 3 to 4 years to complete and it would have no relationship to a weapons capacity.” Several times during the meeting Herter raised questions about safeguards and the plutonium that would be produced in the reactor; Harman could not answer them, but asserted that upon completion the facility would be open to students from “friendly counties” and that it was for peaceful purposes.

Far more candid than Harman was Addy Cohen, the Finance Ministry’s director of economic assistance; a graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, he served as a liaison to the U.S. embassy. Classified in the State Department’s “Roger Channel” for sensitive intelligence, this surprising telegram memorialized several conversations on 21 and 22 December between Cohen and U.S. diplomats and foreign aid officials: Deputy Chief of Mission Murat Williams, Director of the U.S. Operations Mission [USOM][18] C. Reed Liggit, and Agricultural Attaché Grover Chappell. In these discussions Cohen gave the impression that the reactor would “eventually be used for weapons purposes,” which could offer a “‘deterrent’ to Arab action against Israel.” He volunteered that he had concealed the nature of the “top secret” project during several helicopter fly-bys with U.S. officials; during one of them’, in February 1960, he had characterized the reactor construction site as a “textile plant” because as he put it “that was our story at the time.” Admitting that the government of Israel had “been misbehaving a little,” Cohen thought that displeasure over the reactor might be the reason why Washington had delayed the signing of the PL 480 agreement (on food aid to Israel). Finally, commenting on a recent Jerusalem Post article claiming that 250 million Israeli pounds had been spent on the project, Cohen said that Israel had not “spent that much yet.”

Also according to this message, an unidentified official close to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion had told the Canadian ambassador that the secrecy was unjustifiable and that it was “a stupid mistake on the part of Israel.” As to why the subject had come up at this time, December 1960, the same source speculated that the CIA had been “caught off guard” in 1956 when Israel invaded the Sinai desert and this time “did not want to be caught napping.”

Document 16: “Why in [the United] States is Everything Being Told [to] Everybody?”

U.S. Embassy Israel Telegram 577 to State Department, 24 December 1960, Secret

On 22 December Prime Minister Ben-Gurion gave a statement in the Knesset claiming the reactor was for peaceful purposes, a statement which the State Department welcomed.[19] Two days later, Ambassador Ogden Reid finally had a long discussion about Dimona with Ben-Gurion. The latter was plainly irritated about the questions and the press reports: “Why in [the] States is everything being told everybody?” He justified the secrecy because of the Arab boycott; the participating companies did not want their role disclosed so Israel had to protect their interests. Yet his account of the Dimona project consisted of the same story that he had told the Knesset (and the same story that he would use for his meeting with President Kennedy in late May 1961): the project was for the economic development of Israel and of the Negev in particular; electric power was a badly needed resource.[20]Yet when Reid asked if the reactor would be producing power, Ben-Gurion said no; it was for research and training.

On safeguards for plutonium, Ben-Gurion said that Israel was “three or four years” away from facing that problem. But, he declared: “When we get to that point we won’t be behind any power in the world in respect to safeguards.” A few weeks later, Ben-Gurion would take a different position (See Document 23).

Referring to Egyptian President Nasser’s declaration that an Israeli nuclear weapons program would mean war, Reid asked what Israel could do to alleviate those concerns; Ben-Gurion replied that the State Department’s statement welcoming the Israeli declarations, had been helpful.

Document 17: The Need for a Visit by “Internationally Known Scientists”

Mulling over Ben-Gurion’s evasions, Ambassador Reid suggested to the Department some ideas for bringing up the question of safeguards and inspection with Foreign Minister Golda Meir. One was to suggest a visit of “IAEA scientific designee or internationally known scientists”; another, a more low key approach, was to use an AEC inspection visit to the smaller American reactor in Nachal Rubin [Soreq] to ask Israel to visit the new [Dimona] reactor. While doubting whether Ben-Gurion would favor any such proposals, Reid thought State should press Israel to request IAEA safeguards as a step toward “tranquility and peace” in the region. Getting Ben-Gurion to go along would probably require concerted action by the U.S., France, and the United Kingdom. The note included also the embassy’s own estimate of the cost of the Dimona project, which by then was the lowest of all the U.S. estimates: 17.8 million dollars in foreign exchange and some 29.2 million in local currency (Israeli pounds) costs. In comments, Reid noted that Israel would need to be assured that the names of foreign firms involved in the project would be protected from inspectors. Moreover, until the Department agreed, Reid suggested deferring a proposal by Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke for a visit to Dimona by a Navy nuclear expert, Commander Ragnwald Muller, who was with the Office of Naval Intelligence in Frankfurt, West Germany.

Under Secretary of State Merchant briefed Assistant Secretary Lewis Jones about an Operations Coordinating Board [OCB] discussion of the Israel nuclear problem where Allen Dulles had grumbled that Israel had “by no means come clean with us.” The participants were also annoyed that the Development Loan Fund (DLF) had authorized a loan to Israel despite the OCB’s agreement that such action should be delayed. Eisenhower’s national security assistant, Gordon Gray, emphasized that the president wanted further efforts to secure Israel’s agreement to IAEA inspections. Such efforts, however, were not to reach the press and any initiative should be “conducted quietly through diplomatic channels.”

Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs G. Lewis Jones to Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Livingston Merchant, “Israel’s Atomic Energy Activities,” 30 December 1960, Secret, with attachments [Transcript of letter from Jones to Reid, 28 December 1960 attached]

Source: RG 59. Records of the Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, Office of the Country Director for Israel and Arab-Israeli Affairs, Records Relating to Israel, 1964-1966, box 8, Israel Atomic Energy Program

Responding to Merchant’s request for an update on recent developments, Lewis Jones sent him documents relating to six different actions that various offices within the State Department were taking relating to the Israeli reactor, including his recent letter to Ambassador Reid and a message to the Embassy in Norway. In the letter, Jones let his hair down, writing about the “intemperate reaction” in Washington, which his bureau was trying to “calm down,” the “unnecessary Israeli caper;” the widespread impression that “the Israelis have inexcusably duped us;” the need for Israel to dispel doubts by letting U.S. scientists visit the site; and the possibility that the situation will “worsen” as suspicion grows. A briefing that Jones gave to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in early January conveyed a similar sense of being duped and the anger that influential members of the Senate felt about Israel’s secretiveness and evasive responses.

In the telegram to Oslo, the State Department asked the U.S. Embassy to seek further information on the Norwegian sale of heavy water to Israel and to ask that the government “exercise fully its safeguard rights” under the agreement. With the Norwegian heavy water sale being one of the pieces of the intelligence puzzle that Washington had missed, the administration was now investigating why, and what it had missed earlier.

Jones also enclosed a draft message to Ambassador Reid that had been prepared (not attached to this memo, but see Document 21) asking for replies to “unanswered questions” and to let Merchant know that other bureaus were preparing messages to get more information from the French and to advance the possibility of IAEA safeguards. Jones agreed with Merchant that what was most important was avoiding further publicity and the necessity for quiet diplomacy.

Letter from Richard Kerry, U.S. Embassy Oslo, to William Burdette, Office of British Commonwealth and Northern European Affairs, 30 December 1960, with Israeli-Norwegian agreement attached, with routine slip dated 6 January 1961

Source: RG 59, Records of Special Assistant to the Secretary of State for Atomic Energy and Outer Space, 1948-1961, box 512, Z1.69 Country File Norway a. Norway-Israel Agreement 1961

In response to the State Department request, embassy officers in Oslo obtained more information on the Israel-Norway heavy water deal and the terms of the sale agreement, which included a “peaceful uses” stipulation. On 30 December, political officer Richard Kerry obtained a copy of the agreement which he believed could be embarrassing to the Norwegian government in light of its efforts to play the role of “honest broker” in international conflicts, including the Middle East. The agreement included an Israeli commitment that the use of the heavy water was for peaceful purposes, including an inspection clause.

According to Kerry’s letter, a major problem was that the heavy water sale had been initially treated as a commercial sale by the Norwegian firm NORATOM without appropriate vetting by political experts at the Foreign Ministry (like an earlier controversial sale of weapons to the Batista dictatorship in Cuba). Kerry asked the State Department to keep the transaction a secret and so it stayed until the late 1970s when the Stockholm Institute of Peace Research disclosed it. Kerry did not mention the British role in the affair and may, in fact, have forgotten it.[21]

This telegram, originally published in the FRUS in an excised version, showed how unhappy the State Department was with Ben-Gurion’s explanation of the Dimona reactor: his answers “appear evasive.” The State Department saw the “clearly apparent lack of candor [as] difficult to reconcile with [the] confidence which had traditionally characterized U.S.-Israel relations.” To restore confidence, Israel needed to answer questions about its plans to dispose of plutonium, the application of safeguards to plutonium produced, visits by IAEA or other scientists to the reactor site, and whether there were plans to build a third reactor. Moreover, “can Israel state unequivocally that it has no plans for producing nuclear weapons?”

In early January, Ambassador Reid had a meeting with Ben-Gurion, who provided answers to the State Department’s questions. The reporting telegram remains classified at the National Archives but a summary is available. The essence of the matter, according to Ben-Gurion, was that: 1) Israel “has no plans for producing nuclear weapons,” 2) Israel had no plutonium but “as far as we know” returning the plutonium produced by the reactor was a “condition” imposed by the country (France) that sold the uranium, 3) it would not accept IAEA inspection, especially if Russians were involved, or international safeguards “until all reactors are treated as equals,” 3) visits by representatives of “friendly powers” were possible, and 4) Israel had absolutely no plans for a third reactor. How State Department officials interpreted these statements remains unknown, but some may have seen the statement about nuclear weapons as equivocal and evasive.[22]

Believing that neither France nor Israel had been forthright and that the lack of candor had damaging implications for Middle East stability, Herter asked U.S. Ambassador Amory Houghton to meet with Couve de Murville and discuss his earlier statement about the French-Israeli nuclear project. If the Dimona project is a “large scale production reactor,” the French need to be “unequivocally clear that [their] assistance is directed solely to peaceful uses.” The reply to this telegram is not yet available, but the substance can be found in Document 26.

Documents 24A-B: Molotov: “I Stayed Awake All Night and Worried”

A: U.S. Mission to International Atomic Energy Agency (Vienna) telegram 1087 to State Department, 11 January 1961, Secret

B: State Department telegram 1194 to U.S. Mission to International Atomic Energy Agency (Vienna), 13 January 1961, Secret

The U.S. Mission to the IAEA which had been in the forefront of U.S. efforts to develop an effective safeguards policy, asked for policy guidance if the Dimona issue came up for debate at the upcoming meeting of the Board of Governors. Ben-Gurion’s declaration to the Knesset that the reactor was for peaceful purposes was “hardly adequate” because the Mission had been at loggerheads with the Soviets and the Indians who had argued that assurances were the only safeguards that were needed. Recognizing that the Israeli situation would be used to support arguments for strong safeguards, Vayecheslav Molotov, one of the senior Soviet representatives to the Agency (and once Stalin’s right hand man) sarcastically commented that he had “stayed awake all night and worried” when he read about the Israel reactor program.

Following the approach recommended by Lewis Jones and others, the State Department advised the IAEA Mission of the importance of promoting a “period of calm.” In discussions in Vienna, the Mission should “avoid impugning” Israeli statements about peaceful purposes but also avoid a “whitewash” of the Israeli position. It was in the U.S. “interest” to send scientists to visit the reactor site and to get “first-hand information” but the Department noted that the Israelis have “reacted strongly” against any proposal for inspection and are not likely to change in the “immediate future.”

Source: RG 59, Records of Special Assistant to the Secretary of State for Atomic Energy and Outer Space, 1948-1961, box 501, Z1.50 Country File Israel f. Reactor 1961, Part 1 of 2

On his way to an ambassadorship in El Salvador, Murat W. Williams, who had just left his post as deputy chief of mission at the Embassy in Tel Aviv, provided background on the various Israeli cover stories for the Dimona project. Apparently the most truthful response came from Minister of Development director general Eliezer Preminger who told Jack [John James] Haggerty, then the USOM director, that the site was a “military installation” and that he should ask the military attaché to look into it. Williams recounted the dissembling responses from Addy Cohen and other Israeli Foreign Liaison Officers [FLO] who, as noted elsewhere in this posting, had told Ambassador Reid and others that the construction site was for a textile factory, metallurgical research, meteorological installation, and part of a research program at a “new university.”

Document 26: “Israel Has No Plans for the Production of Atomic Weapons”

As the Eisenhower administration was winding down, the State Department submitted this comprehensive report (also published in the FRUS) to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy as a summary of all the information that the State Department had received officially from the Israeli and French governments in response to questions about the Dimona reactor. One must assume this body of information was used to brief the incoming Kennedy administration on what the Israelis and French had said on the record. Some of the answers may have been provided in response to the State Department telegram sent on 31 December (Document 21 above), for example, the statement that all plutonium to be produced in Dimona would be returned to France, and the ambiguous assurance that “Israel has no plans for the production of atomic weapons.” As for the French, they asserted that plutonium produced in the reactor would be returned to France, that France and Israel had agreed that the reactor was for “exclusively peaceful use,” and that French inspectors would be visiting the reactor. Oddly, what is missing is a claim, positive or negative, whether the complex actually included a chemical separation plant that could produce plutonium. Also, the financial estimate was a little different from that cited before (Document 13A).

Source: RG 59, Records of Special Assistant to the Secretary of State for Atomic Energy and Outer Space, 1948-1961, box 501, Z1.50 Country File Israel f. Reactor 1961, Part 1 of 2

This “post-mortem” study on SNIE 100-8-60 is one of the most intriguing documents in this collection. Its aim was to explain why the US intelligence community had failed to detect in real time the Israeli nuclear project, and indeed how late it was in making that determination. The chronology, on pages 8 through 17, provides an account of what was known, and when, about the Israeli nuclear program, concluding that Washington might have seen through Israeli “secrecy or deception” and better understood Israeli intentions at least a year earlier if the “atomic energy intelligence community had properly interpreted” the available information. In essence, the overall conclusion was that the root cause of the delay was not so much the absence of information as that some important reports and items of information had been lost in the shuffle and the dots not properly connected.

As the classification of this document is only “secret,” and the document is relatively brief and deliberately vague about the intelligence means and sources employed in the final determination (e.g. it does not refer explicitly to the U-2 flights), it is possible that the intelligence community had more sensitive information that it excluded from this version of the post-mortem or that a more thorough report on the subject existed with higher classification.

[Note: Several of the documents reproduced above were first published 1998 in “Israel and the Bomb” edited by Avner Cohen.]

[5] Note by Avner Cohen: During interviews I conducted in the 1990s for Israel and the Bomb I heard from different people more conspiratorial explanations for the U.S. intelligence failure on Dimona. Some interviewees claimed that certain people in the U.S. intelligence community were sympathetic to the Israelis and deliberately concealed or bypassed certain information instead of passing it along. For example, the late John Hadden, the CIA station chief in Tel Aviv from 1964-68, held that view strongly. He asked me to treat his suspicions with discretion so I did not publicize them when he was alive. According to Seymour Hersh’s The Samson Option (New York: Random House, 1991), the AEC chairman, Lewis Strauss, “knew as much about Dimona as anybody in the intelligence community by the time he left the AEC in 1958. There is no evidence, however, that he raised questions about the Israeli weapons program while in government. He most certainly did not tell McCone about it.” (83, 90) There are others who also believed that senior officials of the Eisenhower administration, including President Eisenhower himself , had known about Dimona early on but decided not to interfere. According to Dino A. Brugioni, who served at the CIA Photographic Intelligence Center, when U-2 photos of the excavations of the Beersheba site were taken sometimes in early-mid 1958 the activity was determined to be a “probable” nuclear-related site. The photos were shown by the Center director, Arthur C. Lundah, to both President Eisenhower and AEC chair Lewis Strauss, but neither reacted. “Lundhal and Brugioni were left with the impression that Eisenhower wanted Israel to acquire nuclear weapons” (Israel and the Bomb, 83). The same anecdote appears in much greater detail in Hersh’s The Samson Option (50-59).

[7] Choosing this strategy created long-terms risks and problems as well. In essence, it made it much more difficult for Israel to extract any security benefits from, or for, the nuclear project, even if Israel was willing at some point in the future to trade the project’s products for other security benefits. For a more detailed analysis of this evasive disclosure strategy, see Cohen, The Worst-Kept Secret, 61-62.

[8] When we refer to intelligence community, we mean not only the CIA, but also intelligence offices of the Atomic Energy Commission, the Department of State, and the armed services, all of which played a role in colleting and/or analyzing information about Dimona.

[9] On the French-Israeli 1954 bilateral agreement of cooperation in the field of atomic energy, based on the Israeli patents, see Cohen, Israel and the Bomb, 32-34.

[10] Indeed, Bergmann and his IAEC were hardly consulted, let alone involved in the negotiations that Shimon Peres had conducted with the French. As became known years later, Peres, who was Dimona’s prime visionary and promoter, decided to compartmentalize and bypass Bergmann and the IAEC almost entirely about Dimona. In February 1958 all seven IAEC members except Bergmann resigned; the details of this incident remain obscure but it may have been a protest against the exclusion of the IAEC. There was even a time when Bergmann was not allowed to visit the Dimona site. See Cohen, Israel and the Bomb, 14-17, 67-71.

[12] For background, see Cohen, Israel and the Bomb, 60-62; Kristine Werdelin Bergan, editor, “The Norway-United Kingdom-Israel Heavy Water Deal, 1957-1959: New Translations from Norwegian Archives,” forthcoming electronic dossier for the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project.

[13] See “UK Helped Israel Get Nuclear Bomb,” BBC News, 4 August 2005; David Leigh, “US kept in the dark as secret nuclear deal was struck,” The Guardian, 3 August 2005; “Britain’s dirty secret: Exclusive – Secret papers show how Britain helped Israel make the A-bomb in the 1960s, ” The New Statesman, 13 March 2006. See also the Foreign Office Statement, 9 March 2006, BBC Two.

[15] On the U-2 issue, Seymour Hersh provides a fascinating and persuasive account, but the recollections of key participants need to be supported by government records. See The Samson Option, at pages 50-58.

[21] In 1986, Norway asked Israel whether the heavy water had been used in ways that were consistent with the agreement’s “peaceful uses” conditions. See Charles R. Babcock, “Norway Eyes Israel’s Use of Nuclear Ingredient,”Washington Post, 10 November 1986.

John F. Kennedy was a member of Congress when he first met Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in 1951. In this photograph taken at Ben-Gurion’s home, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., then a member of Congress from New York, sat between them. (Image from Geopolitiek in Perspectief)

Kennedy, Dimona and the Nuclear Proliferation Problem: 1961-1962

by Avner Cohen and William Burr

Washington, D.C., April 21, 2016 – President John F. Kennedy worried that Israel’s nuclear program was a potentially serious proliferation risk and insisted that Israel permit periodic inspections to mitigate the danger, according to declassified documents published today by the National Security Archive, Nuclear Proliferation International History Project, and the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. Kennedy pressured the government of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to prevent a military nuclear program, particularly after stage-managed tours of the Dimona facility for U.S. government scientists in 1961 and 1962 raised suspicions within U.S. intelligence that Israel might be concealing its underlying nuclear aims. Kennedy’s long-run objective, documents show, was to broaden and institutionalize inspections of Dimona by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

On 30 May 1961, Kennedy met Ben-Gurion in Manhattan to discuss the bilateral relationship and Middle East issues. However, a central (and indeed the first) issue in their meeting was the Israeli nuclear program, about which President Kennedy was most concerned. According to a draft record of their discussion, which has never been cited, and is published here for the first time, Ben-Gurion spoke “rapidly and in a low voice” and “some words were missed.” He emphasized the peaceful, economic development-oriented nature of the Israeli nuclear project. Nevertheless the note taker, Assistant Secretary of State Philips Talbot, believed that he heard Ben-Gurion mention a “pilot” plant to process plutonium for “atomic power” and also say that “there is no intention to develop weapons capacity now.” Ben-Gurion tacitly acknowledged that the Dimona reactor had a military potential, or so Talbot believed he had heard. The final U.S. versionof the memcon retained the sentence about plutonium but did not include the language about a “pilot” plant and “weapons capacity.”

The differences between the two versions suggest the difficulty of preparing accurate records of meetings. But whatever Ben-Gurion actually said, President Kennedy was never wholly satisfied with the insistence that Dimona was strictly a peaceful project. Neither were U.S. intelligence professionals. A recently declassified National Intelligence Estimate on Israel prepared several months after the meeting, and published here for the first time, concluded that “Israel may have decided to undertake a nuclear weapons program. At a minimum, we believe it has decided to develop its nuclear facilities in such a way as to put it into a position to develop nuclear weapons promptly should it decide to do so.” This is the only NIE where the discussion of Dimona has been declassified in its entirety.

Declassified documents reveal that more than any other American president, John F. Kennedy was personally engaged with the problem of Israel’s nuclear program; he may also have been more concerned about it than any of his successors. Of all U.S. leaders in the nuclear age, Kennedy was the nonproliferation president. Nuclear proliferation was his “private nightmare,” as Glenn Seaborg, his Atomic Energy Commission chairman, once noted. Kennedy came to office with the conviction that the spread of nuclear weapons would make the world a much more dangerous place; he saw proliferation as the path to a global nuclear war. This concern shaped his outlook on the Cold War even before the 1960 presidential campaign – by then he had already opposed the resumption of nuclear testing largely due to proliferation concerns – and his experience in office, especially the Cuban Missile Crisis, solidified it further.

This Electronic Briefing Book (EBB) is the first of two publications which address the subject of JFK, his administration, and the Israeli nuclear program. It includes about thirty documents produced by the State Department, the Atomic Energy Commission, and intelligence agencies, some of which highlight the president’s strong personal interest and direct role in moving nonproliferation policy forward during the administration’s first two years. Some of the documents have been only recently declassified, while others were located in archival collections; most are published here for the first time. The compilation begins with President Kennedy’s meeting with departing ambassador to Israel Odgen Reid on January 31, 1961, days after Kennedy took office, and concludes with the State Department’s internal review in late 1962 of the of the second U.S. visit in Dimona.

The documents published today also include:

The Atomic Energy Commission’s recently declassified report on the first official U.S. visit to the Dimona complex, in May 1961. The Ben-Gurion-Kennedy meeting was possible only after that visit produced a positive report on the peaceful, nonmilitary purposes of the reactor. According to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), Dimona “was conceived as a means for gaining experience in construction of a nuclear facility which would prepare them for nuclear power in the long run.”

A letter from the State Department to the AEC asking it to place prominent Israeli nuclear scientist Dr. Israel Dostrovsky of the Weizman Institute, who was a visiting researcher at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, under “discreet surveillance” as a “precautionary step” to safeguard U.S. nuclear know-how. The document notes Dostrovsky’s reputation as one of the individuals “primarily responsible for guiding Israel’s atomic energy program.” In 1966 Dostrovsky was appointed by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol as director-general of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission, which he reorganized and gave new impetus.

Recently declassified records of U.S.-U.K. meetings during 1962 to discuss the possibilities of putting pressure on Israel to accept inspections of Dimona by the International Atomic Energy Agency. While State Department officials did not believe that pressure would work, they agreed that “IAEA controls should be our objective.” In the meantime, “interim ad hoc inspections” were necessary to satisfy ourselves and the world-at-large as to Israel’s intentions.”

An assessment of the second AEC visit to the Dimona site in September 1962. After weeks of diplomatic pressure by the Kennedy administration for a second visit, two AEC scientists who had inspected the U.S.-supplied Soreq reactor were “spontaneously” invited for a [tk: Bill, 40 or 45 minutes? All other references are to 40.] 45-minute tour to Dimona, while on their way back from an excursion to the Dead Sea. They had no time to see the complete installation, but they left the site with the impression that Dimona was a research reactor, not a production reactor. CIA and State Department officials were skeptical about the circumstances, unable to determine whether the spontaneous invitation was a treat or a trick.

******************

President-elect John F. Kennedy and Secretary of State-designate Dean Rusk Meet with President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State Christian Herter, 19 January 1961. At this meeting Herter warned Kennedy about the Israeli nuclear problem (Photograph AR6279-D, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library)

More than any other country, it was Israel which most impressed upon President Kennedy the complexity of nuclear proliferation. Israel was the first case with which he had to struggle as president. Only weeks before his inauguration, the outgoing Eisenhower administration quietly discovered and confirmed the secret reactor at Dimona. In mid-December the news leaked out while the Eisenhower administration was pondering a Special National Intelligence Estimate, which asserted that, on the basis of the available evidence “plutonium production for weapons is at least one major purpose of this effort.” According to the estimate, if it was widely believed that Israel was acquiring a nuclear weapons capability it would cause “consternation” in the Arab world, with blame going to the U.S. and France for facilitating the project. The United Arab Republic (Egypt/Syria) would “feel the most threatened,” might approach the Soviets for more “countervailing military aid and political backing,” and the Arab world in general might be prompted to take “concrete actions” against Western interests in the region. Moreover, Israel’s “initiative might remove some of the inhibitions to development of nuclear weapons in other Free World countries.”

On January 19, 1961, on the eve of his inauguration, President-elect Kennedy visited the White House – for the last time as a guest – along with his senior team. After 45 minutes of one-on-one conversation with President Eisenhower, the two men walked to the Cabinet Room to join their departing and incoming secretaries of state, defense and treasury to discuss the transition. One of Kennedy’s first questions was about the countries which were most determined to seek the bomb. “Israel and India,” Secretary of State Christian Herter fired back, and added that the newly discovered Dimona reactor, being constructed with aid from France, could be capable of generating 90 kilogram of weapons-grade plutonium by 1963. Herter urged the new president to press hard on inspection in the case of Israel before it introduced nuclear weapons into the Middle East.[1]

With his concern about stability in the Middle East and the broader nuclear proliferation threat, Kennedy took Herter’s advice seriously. Within days he met with departing Ambassador Reid for discussions of Dimona and other regional matters. To help him prepare for the meeting, new Secretary of State Dean Rusk provided an updated report about Israel’s nuclear activities and a detailed chronology of the discovery of Dimona. For the rest of Kennedy’s time in office, Dimona would remain an issue of special and personal concern to him and to his close advisers.

The most important event covered in this collection was the “nuclear summit” held at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City on May 30, 1961, between Kennedy and Ben-Gurion. We refer to it as a nuclear summit because Dimona was at the heart of that meeting. The encounter was made possible thanks to a reassuring report about the first American visit to Dimona, which had taken place ten days earlier.

Kennedy had tirelessly pressured Ben-Gurion to allow the visit since taking office, insisting that meeting the request – made initially by the Eisenhower administration after the discovery of Dimona – was a condition for normalizing U.S.-Israeli relations. In a sense, Kennedy turned the question into a de facto ultimatum to Israel. For weeks Ben-Gurion dragged his feet, possibly even manufacturing or at least magnifying a domestic political dispute (what was known in Israel as the Lavon Affair) into a government resignation, primarily as a ploy to stall or delay that Dimona visit.

By April 1961, after a new government had been organized, Israeli Ambassador Avram Harman finally told the administration that Israel had agreed to an American tour of Dimona. On May 20, two AEC scientists, U. M. Staebler and J. W. Croach Jr., visited the nuclear facility on a carefully crafted tour. The visit began with a briefing by a Dimona senior management team, headed by Director-General Manes Pratt, who presented a technological rationale for, and historical narrative of, the project: the Dimona nuclear research center, the Americans were told, was “conceived as a means for gaining experience in construction of a nuclear facility which would prepare them [Israel] for nuclear power in the long run.” In essence, according to Pratt, this was a peaceful project. As the American team’s summary report, which was highlighted in a memorandum to National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, made very clear, the AEC team believed that the Israelis had told them the truth: the scientists were “satisfied that nothing was concealed from them and that the reactor is of the scope and peaceful character previously described to the United States by representatives of the Government of Israel.”

The AEC’s team’s official report (document 8A) is now available for the first time. Previously only draft notes written by the team’s leader had been accessible to researchers. The differences between the two versions are minor except for a noteworthy paragraph in the final report, under the headline “General comment.” That paragraph is important because it reveals that the Israeli hosts told the AEC team that the reactor’s power was likely to double in the future. “It is quite possible that after operating experience has been obtained the power level of the reactor can be increased by a factor of the order of two by certain modifications in design and relaxation of some operating conditions.” The AEC team could have seen that acknowledgement as a red flag, a worrisome indication that the reactor was capable of producing much more plutonium than was then acknowledged. But the team’s one-sentence response was benign: “Design conservatism of this order is understandable for a project of this type,” On the basis of such a positive report, the Waldorf Astoria meeting was able to go ahead.

The Kennedy-Ben-Gurion Meeting

Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs G. Lewis Jones, an Eisenhower administration hold-over, was on the receiving end of President Kennedy’s telephone calls asking for updates on the requests for a visit by U.S. scientists to Israel’s Dimona complex. (National Archives, Still Pictures Branch, 59-S0, box 20)

This collection includes both American and Israeli transcripts of the Waldorf Astoria meeting. One of the transcripts is a previously unknown draft of the Kennedy-Ben-Gurion memcon, which has interesting differences with the final version. The U.S. official memorandum of conversation, declassified and published in the 1990s, was prepared by Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs Phillips Talbot (and approved – possibly corrected – by White House Deputy Special Counsel Myer “Mike” Feldman). The Israeli minutes, prepared by Ambassador Avraham Harman, were also declassified in the 1990s and historians have made extensive use of them.[2]

Ben-Gurion provided Kennedy with a rationale and narrative of the Dimona project that was very similar to what the Israeli hosts provided to the AEC team visiting Dimona (albeit in non-technical and more political terms): the Dimona project was peaceful in nature; it was about energy and development. However, unlike during the Dimona visit, Ben-Gurion’s narrative and rationale left a little wiggle room for a future reversal. The prime minister did that by qualifying his peaceful pledge and leaving room for a future change of heart. The Israeli transcript makes Ben-Gurion’s caveat pronounced: “for the time being, the only purposes are for peace. … But we will see what will happen in the Middle East. It does not depend on us” (italics added). The American transcript, by way of rephrasing Ben-Gurion, reveals a similar caveat as well: “Our main – and for the time being – only purpose is this [cheap energy, etc.],” the Prime Minister said, adding that “we do not know what will happen in the future” … Furthermore, commenting on the political and strategic implications of atomic power and weaponry, the Prime Minister said he does believe that “in ten or fifteen years the Egyptian presumably could achieve it themselves” (italics added).

In his draft minutes, Assistant Secretary Talbot notes (in parentheses) that during that part of the conversation, Ben-Gurion spoke “rapidly and in a low voice” so that “some words were missed.” Nevertheless, Talbot thought that he had heard Ben-Gurion making reference to a “pilot plant for plutonium separation which is needed for atomic power,” but that might happen “three or four years later” and that “there is no intention to develop weapons capacity now.” Talbot’s draft was declassified long ago but has been buried in obscurity; it needs to be taken into account by scholars. Notably, the Israeli transcript is even more straightforward in citing Ben-Gurion on the pilot plant issue: “after three or four years we shall have a pilot plant for separation which is needed anyway for a power reactor.”

Days after the meeting, Talbot sat with Feldman at the White House to “check fine points” about “side lines of interest.” There was the key issue of plutonium, about which Ben-Gurion mumbled quickly in a low voice. Ben-Gurion was understood to say something to the effect that the issue of plutonium would not arise until the installation was complete in 1964 or so, and only then could Israel decide what to do about processing it. But this appeared to be incompatible with what the prime minister had said to Ambassador Reid in Tel Aviv in January 1961, namely that the spent fuel would return to the country which provided the uranium in the first place (France). But Israeli affairs desk officer, William R. Crawford, who looked further into the record, suggested that what Ben-Gurion had said was more equivocal and evasive. Upon close examination, Ben-Gurion might have meant to hint in passing that Israel was preserving its freedom of action to produce plutonium for its own purposes. Kennedy may not have picked up on this point, but he, like Talbot, may not have been sure exactly what Ben-Gurion had said.

Intelligence Estimate

The most intriguing – and novel – document in this collection is National Intelligence Estimate 35-61 (document #11a), under the headline “Outlook on Israel,” which was declassified only in February 2015. This NIE left no doubt that the AEC scientists’ impressions from their visit to Dimona had no impact on the way which the intelligence community made its own determination on Dimona’s overall purpose. While the visit clearly helped to ease the political and diplomatic tensions between the United States and Israel over Dimona, and removed, at least temporarily, the nuclear issue as a problem from the bilateral agenda, it did not change the opinion of U.S. intelligence professionals. In their view, while acknowledging the Israeli official narrative of Dimona as peaceful, it was truly about weapons capability. The Dimona complex provided Israel with the experience and resources “to develop a plutonium production capability.” NIE 35-61 reminded its readers that France had supplied “plans, material, equipment and technical assistance to the Israelis.”

Significantly, the intelligence community estimated in 1961 that Israel would be in a position to “produce sufficient weapons grade plutonium for one or two crude weapons a year by 1965-66, provided separation facilities with a capacity larger than that of the pilot plant now under construction are available.” In retrospect, in all these respects, NIE 35-61 was accurate in its assessments and predictions, although no one on the U.S. side knew for sure when Israel would possess the requisite reprocessing facilities. The language about “separation facilities” raises important questions. If Israel was to produce nuclear weapons it would require technology to reprocess spent fuel into plutonium. Whether and when U.S. intelligence knew that Israel had begun work on a secret, dedicated separation plant – larger than a pilot plant – at the Dimona complex has yet to be disclosed. But if the CIA knew about such plans, it may have meant that key information was concealed from AEC scientists who visited Dimona (or perhaps they were instructed to locate such facilities).[3]

Probably lacking secret knowledge of internal Israeli government thinking, the authors of NIE 35-61 may not have fully understood the depth of Israel’s nuclear resolve, or at least, the modus operandi by which Israel proceeded with its nuclear project. They could not be fully clear – both conceptually and factually – on the nature of the Israeli nuclear commitment, i.e., whether Dimona was a dedicated weapons program from the very start, or, alternatively, whether it was set up as infrastructure leading to a weapons capability upon a later decision. At a minimum, however, the authors of NIE 35-61 believed “that the Israelis intend at least to put themselves in the position of being able to produce nuclear weapons fairly soon after a decision to do so.”

Notwithstanding the lack of clarity, the NIE’s findings were incompatible with what Ben-Gurion told Kennedy about the overall purpose of the Dimona project as well as with what he said about Dimona’s plutonium production capacity. Similarly, the NIE was inconsistent with the AEC report whose writers accepted the Israeli narrative and rationale. The bottom line was that as early as 1961 the CIA already knew – or at least suspected – that the Israeli official account of the Dimona project – either by the prime minister or by Israeli scientists – was a cover story and deceptive by nature.

The Second Visit

The AEC visit and the Ben-Gurion Kennedy meeting helped clear the air a bit, but the wary view embodied in the NIE shaped U.S. perceptions of the Dimona project. The Kennedy administration held to its conviction that it was necessary to monitor Dimona, not only to resolve American concerns about nuclear proliferation but also to calm regional anxieties about an Israeli nuclear threat. In this context, the United States did not want to continue to be the only country that guaranteed the peaceful nature of Dimona to the Arab countries. Hence, during the months after the meetings, State Department officials tried to follow up President Kennedy’s interest in having scientists from “neutral” nations, such as Sweden, visit the Dimona plant. The British also favored such ideas but they sought U.S. pressure to induce the Israelis to accept inspection visits by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The Kennedy administration believed that IAEA inspections of Dimona were a valid long-term goal but recognized that a second visit by U.S. scientists was necessary if a visit by neutrals could not be arranged.

The talks with the Swedes did not pan out; by June 1962, the Kennedy administration decided to “undertake the responsibility once more.” On 26 September 1962, after “repeated requests over several months,” a second American visit to Dimona finally took place. Until recently little was known about that visit except that Ambassador Walworth Barbour referred to it as “unduly restricted to no more than forty five minutes.”[4] Also, the late professor Yuval Ne’eman, at the time serving as the scientific director of the Soreq nuclear research center and the official host of the American AEC visitors, was cited in Israel and the Bomb to the effect that the visit was a deliberate “trick” (the word “trick” was used but was not cited in the book) he devised and executed to ease American pressure for a second formal visit in Dimona.[5]

Phillips Talbot, who succeeded Jones as Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, and as a note-taker at the Kennedy/Ben-Gurion meeting had to make sense of the Prime Minister’s rapid and “low” voice. (National Archives, Still Picture Branch, 59-SO, box 41)

This collection includes archival material that sheds light on the second visit. The key document is a memo, written on 27 December 1962, by deputy director of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs Rodger Davies to Assistant Secretary Talbot on the September visit. It was hiding in plain sight in a microfilm supplement to the State Department historical series, Foreign Relations of the United States. The memo narrated the improvised circumstances of the visit which fit well with the way Ne’eman told the story in the late 1990s. As the two AEC scientists who had arrived to inspect the small reactor at Soreq – Thomas Haycock and Ulysses Staebler – were being driven back from their Dead Sea tour, Ne’eman noted that they were passing by the Dimona reactor and that he could spontaneously “arrange a call with the director.” Notably, Staebler was among the two AEC scientists who had visited Dimona in May 1961, so he must have met director Pratt. It turned out that the director was not there, but the chief engineers gave them a 40-minute tour of the reactor.

The 27 December document reveals that the circumstances of that tour made the AEC visitors feel a little awkward, “not certain whether they were guests of their scientist-host or on an inspection.” They did not see the complete installation, nor did they enter all the buildings they saw, but they believed that what they saw confirmed that Dimona was a research reactor, not a production reactor; and that, from their point of view, made the visit worthwhile and “satisfactory.” The memo also notes that the AEC scientists were presented with the option to come back to the site to complete the visit the next morning, but because that would have forced a four-day layover they declined the offer.

According to Rodger Davies, the highly unconventional nature of the visit stirred suspicion within the relevant intelligence offices in Washington. During one interagency meeting to discuss the visit’s intelligence value, the CIA’s “Director of Intelligence,” probably a reference to Deputy Director of Intelligence Ray Cline, was quoted as saying that “the immediate objectives of the visit may have been satisfied, [but] certain basic intelligence requirements were not.” It was also observed that “there were certain inconsistencies between the first and second inspection reports insofar as the usages attributed to some equipment were concerned.” The fact that the inspectors were invited to visit again the next day seemed to indicate that “there was no deliberate ’hanky-panky’ involved on the part of the [ Israelis,” but the fact that such a return visit would have caused a major delay in the team’s departure flight made the Israeli offer impractical and perhaps disingenuous.

Whatever the doubts about the intelligence value, the State Department deployed the visits’ conclusions to assure interested countries that Dimona was peaceful. A few weeks afterwards, just as the Cuban Missile Crisis was unfolding, the State Department began to quietly inform selected governments about its positive results. U.S. diplomats told Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, during a briefing on the Cuban situation, that the recent visit confirmed Israeli statements about the reactor. The British and Canadians were also told similar things about the “recent brief visit” to Dimona, without explaining what had made it so short. By the end of October, the Department had sent a fuller statement to various embassies.

Davies’ memorandum cites a formal report, dated October 12, 1962, prepared by the AEC team about their visit. But the report was not attached to the memorandum found in State Department files. Unfortunately, except for the 1961 visit report, the Department of Energy has been unable to locate the 1962 report or other such reports from the following years.

THE DOCUMENTS

Documents 1A-B: Briefing President Kennedy

Document 1A: Secretary of State Rusk to President Kennedy, “Your Appointment with Ogden R. Reid, Recently Ambassador to Israel,” 30 January 1961, with memorandum and chronology attached, Secret, Excised copy

Document 1B: Memorandum of Conversation, “Ambassador Reid’s Review of His Conversation with President Kennedy,” 31 January 1961, Secret

Source: National Archives College Park, Record Group 59, records of the Department of State (hereinafter RG 59), Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, Office of Near Eastern Affairs (NESA/NEA). Records of the Director, 1960-1963, box 5, Tel Aviv – 1961

On 31 January 1961, only days after his inauguration, President Kennedy met with Ogden Reid, who had just resigned as U.S. ambassador to Israel, for a comprehensive briefing on U.S.-Israel relations, including the problem of the Dimona nuclear reactor (an issue in which the new president had a “special interest”). To help prepare the president for the meeting, Secretary of State Dean Rusk signed off on a briefing paper, which contained also a detailed chronology of the discovery of the Dimona reactor, and which reviewed the problems raised by the secret atomic project as well as U.S. interest in sending scientists there to determine whether there was a proliferation risk.

In their 45-minute meeting, Ambassador Reid told President Kennedy that he believed the U.S “can accept at face value Ben-Gurion’s assurance that the reactor is to be devoted to peaceful purposes” and that a visit to Dimona by a qualified American scientist could be arranged, “if it is done on a secret basis.”

Document 2A-E: Pressing for a Visit

Document 2A: Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs to Secretary of State, “President’s Suggestion re Israeli Reactor,” 2 February 1961, Secret

Concerned about a recent visit to Cairo by Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Semenov and the possibility that the Soviets might exploit Egyptian concerns over Dimona, President Kennedy pressed State to arrange an inspection visit at Dimona by a U.S. scientist. Assistant Secretary of State G. Lewis Jones soon met with Israeli Ambassador Harman, who explained that the Israeli government was preoccupied with an ongoing domestic political crisis. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion announced his resignation and his intention to take a four-week vacation while still being head of a “caretaker government.” Moreover, Ambassador Harman could not understand why Washington had not simply accepted Ben-Gurion’s assurances about Dimona. Jones responded that suspicions remained and that as a “close friend,” Israel needed to help allay them.

After informing Kennedy about the Harman-Jones conversation, Secretary of State Rusk had his own meeting with Harman, where he also raised the desirability of a visit, noting that Israeli “candor” was important to the state of the U.S.-Israeli relationship. During that conversation as well as another with national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, Harman disparaged Dimona’s importance, arguing that its existence had leaked out “unnecessarily.” But Bundy emphasized “legitimate” Arab concern about the Israeli nuclear project. It is interesting to note that in internal American documents the reference is always to an “inspection,” but when the issue was discussed with Israeli diplomats, U.S. officials avoided raising their hackles by always referring to a “visit.”

Documents 3A-F: Raising Pressure for an Invitation

Document 3A: U.S. Mission to the United Nations (New York) telegram number 2242 to Department of State, “Eyes Only” from Reid to Secretary, 20 February 1961, Secret

Document 3F: Memorandum from Secretary Rusk to President Kennedy, “Dimona Reactor in Israel,” 30 March 1961, with “History of United States Interest in Israel’s Atomic Energy Activities,” attached, Secret

It took many more weeks of back-and-forth American-Israeli exchanges after departing Ambassador Reid told President Kennedy that an American inspection could be arranged. While visiting the United States for fund raising purposes, Ben-Gurion’s chief of staff (and future mayor of Jerusalem) Theodore “Teddy” Kollek met with Ogden Reid in New York and with Assistant Secretary Jones in Washington. He told Reid that Ben-Gurion would accept a visit to Dimona once a new government had been formed in six to eight weeks. Kollek told Jones that a visit “during March” was possible and personally agreed that it would allay suspicions if Dimona was under the control of the Weizmann Institute instead of the Defense Ministry.

The news about a possible March visit went to President Kennedy, but on 13 March Ambassador Harman had nothing to report, claiming that the Israeli government was still preoccupied with domestic politics. At month’s end, Kennedy intervened, apparently calling Jones directly for information about the status of the U.S. request. Following up, Jones called in Ambassador Harman for an update, noting Kennedy’s keen interest in the matter and the importance of Israel removing any “shadow of doubt” about the purpose of Dimona. Harman had no news but believed that nothing would be resolved until Passover ended on 10 April. A chronology that Rusk attached to his memo to Kennedy indicated that the State Department had been asking about the visit at “approximately weekly intervals.”

By early April, Ben-Gurion realized he no longer could postpone the American visit to Dimona. His diary revealed that he was persuaded by White House special counsel Myer “Mike” Feldman, and Kennedy political ally Abraham Feinberg, who was involved in fund raising for Dimona, that a meeting between him and Kennedy, in return for an American visit at Dimona, could save the nuclear project. On 10 April, Ambassador Harman finally told Jones and Philip Farley, the special assistant to the secretary of state for atomic energy and outer space matters, that Israel was formally inviting a U.S. scientist to visit the Dimona complex during the week of 15 May, but that the visit should be secret. Jones and Farley agreed that the visit should not be publicized but worried that secrecy could be “counter-productive.” As Jones explained to Rusk the next day, “It seems to us to defeat the objective of establishing that the reactor is a normal civilian atomic project if extreme measures of secrecy are taken in connection with the visit.” Jones also informed Rusk that the Atomic Energy Commission had selected two of its scientists to make the visit: Ulysses Staebler, assistant director of reactor development and chief of the Civilian Power Reactors Branch, and Jesse Croach Jr., a heavy water reactor expert with Dupont, the AEC’s principal contractor for heavy water reactor work.

Jones wrote a briefing paper to help Rusk prepare to speak with Harman about the Dimona invitation, but the only record of their meeting that has surfaced publicly is the part of the conversation concerning Ben-Gurion’s request for a meeting with President Kennedy, possibly as early as the week of April 23. Rusk responded that he would pass on the request to the president but expressed his doubts as the president’s schedule was already full until the first week of June.

Israel kept pushing the necessity for secrecy, but Washington insisted that a “quiet visit” was enough to keep Croach and Staebler out of the spotlight. Moreover, the Kennedy administration wanted to be able to inform allies, such as the British, about the visit’s findings. While the Israelis wanted Washington to agree to push the visit back until after the Ben-Gurion-Kennedy meeting, the State Department, under instructions from the White House, refused to change the schedule: the administration wanted the visit to occur before Kennedy met with Ben-Gurion, so that the findings could be fully assessed. The State Department was determined to meet that goal, as was evident from the preparations for a meeting with the inspectors.

The second-ranking diplomat at the Israeli Embassy, Mordechai Gazit, raised questions to Phillip Farley about the real purposes of the U.S. visit to Dimona. Justifying the secrecy as protection for suppliers against the Arab boycott of Israel, Gazit argued that it would be years before the reactor could have any military potential and, in any event, Israel needed whatever “means it could find” to defend itself. Taking in Gazit’s implicit admission, Farley noted that Washington was concerned about the impact that an Israeli nuclear project aimed at weapons could have on the region and that an Israeli nuclear weapons program would be disastrous for world stability. “I could not see how Israel could long expect to have nuclear weapons without its enemies also getting them in some way. Once there, were nuclear weapons on both sides, I thought Israel would be in a desperate state.” Its territory was simply too small for it to survive even a small exchange.” Farley’s argument reflects the fundamental Israeli nuclear dilemma to this day.

Memorandum, by L.D. Battle, Executive Secretary, to McGeorge Bundy, Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, “American Scientists’ Visit to Israel’s Dimona Reactor,” 18 May 1961, Secret

Source: RG 59, DF, 884A.1901/5-1861

President Kennedy told the new U.S. ambassador to Israel, Walworth Barbour, that he was concerned about Israel’s insistence on a secret visit as well as the “absence of a ‘neutral’ scientist” in the visit to Dimona. Addressing Kennedy’s concerns, the State Department took the position that it was better to put up with Ben-Gurion’s “sensitivities” about secrecy than “have no visit” at all. Nevertheless, the Department advised the White House that “complete and continued secrecy as to the results of the visit would [not] be possible.” The results of the visit would be conveyed to appropriate U.S. agencies “in due course” and would be shared perhaps with some “friendly” governments. Moreover, the U.S. believed that once the Israelis became used to visits to Dimona it might be possible to persuade them to accept visits by scientists from other countries or a publicized inspection by the IAEA.

During their visit to Israel (May 17-May 22), AEC scientists Croach and Staebler visited the Weizman Institute, the Technion, the USAEC-funded swimming pool experimental reactor at Soreq, and finally the Dimona complex then under construction. It was in that first visit that Israel provided its “cover” story for the Dimona project, a narrative of “plausible deniability” that would be observed during all future visits.[6] When Croach and Staebler met with State Department officials on their return, they said that they were “satisfied” that the reactor was “of the scope and peaceful character” claimed by Israeli officials. That could only be a tentative judgment because Dimona was still an unfinished project. Although Croach and Staebler found no evidence that the Israelis had nuclear weapons production in mind, they acknowledged that “the reactor eventually will produce small quantities of plutonium suitable for weapons.” Their official report to the AEC was far more circumspect, not mentioning the weapons potential or a capability to produce plutonium. Nevertheless, as noted earlier, they mentioned the Israeli statement about the possibility that the reactor’s power could be doubled in the future, which would increase the potential to produce plutonium.

Document 9B: Memorandum of Conversation, “President Kennedy, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, Ambassador Avraham Harman of Israel, Myer Feldman of the White House Staff, and Philips Talbot, Assistant Secretary, Near East and South Asian Affairs, at the Waldorf Astoria, New York, 4:45 p.m. to 6:15 p.m.,” 30 May 1961, Secret, Draft

Document 9C: Ambassador Harman’s Record of the Meeting, with attachment on the “Atomic Reactor” (and transcript), sent with cover letter by Mordechai Gazit to Israeli Foreign Ministry, 7 June 1961

Document 9D: Memorandum by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near East and South Asian Affairs Armin H. Meyer of White House discussion on Ben-Gurion/Kennedy Meeting, n.d. [circa 9 June 1961], Secret

On his way to the Vienna summit with Nikita Khrushchev, Kennedy stopped in Manhattan to meet with Ben-Gurion.[7] For both leaders, the Dimona question was a top priority; just as Kennedy wanted Israel to “remove any doubts” that other countries had about its purposes, so Ben-Gurion wanted to resolve this outstanding problem and to let the project be finished quietly. Ben-Gurion stood by his earlier statements that the “main” purpose of the reactor was peaceful – namely, internal economic development. Given Kennedy’s interest in regional stability and aversion to nuclear proliferation, he wanted to be able to let Israel’s Arab neighbors know about the positive results of the recent Dimona visit by American scientists.

The official U.S. memorandum of conversation is published in the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States (the file copy at the National Archives is classified even though the FRUS volume has been published), and an Israeli English-language version is also available. As noted earlier, a draft of the official memcon has surfaced which has some interesting differences with the final versions: for example, Ben-Gurion’s tacit acknowledgement of a nuclear weapons potential and a statement suggesting freedom of action about eventual reprocessing. The Israeli minutes of the conversation manifest Ben-Gurion’s ambiguities and evasiveness even more strongly, for example, his assertion that “for the time being, the only purposes of [the Dimona reactor] are for peace.” Moreover, he said, “we will see what happens in the Middle East.”

Documents 10A-C: Sharing the Findings

Document 10A: State Department telegram 5701 to U.S. Embassy United Kingdom, 31 May 1961, Secret

When Kennedy said that he would like to share the findings of the Dimona visit with other governments, Ben-Gurion did not object to that or the possibility of visits by “neutral” scientists. The British had already asked for information on the Kennedy-Ben-Gurion meeting and one day later, their embassy was given the gist of the Dimona visit report as well as a brief description of the meeting. The State Department made plans to brief Arab governments, but Deputy Assistant Secretary Armin Meyer asked Ambassador Harman if his government would be willing to work with U.S. representatives at the IAEA Board of Governors meeting to make an announcement of the visit to Dimona and also to undertake quiet discussions at the meeting about a possible neutral visit to Dimona. Harman, however, objected to an IAEA role in the Dimona matter until the rest of the world had accepted the idea of inspections and he wanted Washington to coordinate any visit by neutral scientists.

The State Department had already sent a message to Egyptian Foreign Minister Fawzi about the visit and soon sent a circular telegram to embassies in the region, but also to Oslo (Norway was interested because of its heavy water sales to Israel). Through those messages the “highest levels” of those governments were to be informed that the U.S. scientists had “found no evidence” of Israeli preparations for producing nuclear weapons.

The State Department’s assurances notwithstanding, within U.S. intelligence circles doubts lingered. In a National Intelligence Estimate on Israel, declassified in 2015 at the request of the National Security Archive, the U.S. intelligence community concluded that:

Israel may have decided to undertake a nuclear weapons program. At a minimum, we believe it has decided to develop its nuclear facilities in such a way as to put it into a position to develop nuclear weapons promptly should it decide to do.

Moreover, if the Israeli had made such a decision, by 1965-1966, the Dimona reactor would produce enough plutonium to build one or two nuclear weapons a year, although to do that they would need larger processing capabilities than the pilot plant then in the works. Other obstacles were the lack of testing facilities and the problem that a test would use up scarce fissile material supplies. Another obstacle, cited by State Department atomic energy adviser Philip Farley in a letter to an AEC official, was a lack of weapons design information. In light of that concern, Farley advised the AEC to be “alert” to the possibility that Israeli scientists might try to acquire nuclear weapons design information “through clandestine means in the United States.” Thus, “discreet surveillance” was necessary of Dr. Israel Dostrovsky, an eminent Israeli chemist, who had recently been given a teaching fellowship at Brookhaven National Laboratory. An expert on isotopes and isotope separation, Dostrovsky was a key figure in Israel’s nuclear-scientific establishment, later becoming the director general of the Atomic Energy Commission (1966-1970). That Dotrovsky had close ties to the Israeli defense establishment may have influenced the notion that he should be a target for surveillance.[8]

The Kennedy administration had to balance its apprehensions over Dimona with other concerns, such as the broader implications of the status of Palestinian refugees. With respect to Dimona, the State Department kept in mind President Kennedy’s interest in visits by neutral scientists and Ben-Gurion’s approval of such. Moreover, State Department officials believed that a neutral visit could “obviate any overtones of inspections, which is [sic] unacceptable to Israel,” and also make it possible for Washington to avoid being the sole “guarantor of Israel’s nuclear intentions” on the basis of the May 1961 visit by AEC scientists. During a meeting with Ambassador Harman, Phillips Talbot brought up again the idea of neutral visits and mentioned that Farley had some suggestions to make. Harman said that he would be happy to meet with Farley but that Israel would “prefer a visit by Scandinavian or Swiss scientists.”

Document 13: Memorandum by Robert Amory, Deputy Director of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, to Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs [McGeorge Bundy], 18 January 1962, Secret, excised copy

That the Central Intelligence Agency has kept secret important findings about the Dimona project is evident from this heavily excised report to McGeorge Bundy, which has been under appeal since 2010. Whatever the findings were, they were enough to induce Bundy to ask his aide, Robert Komer, to “prod” the State Department to arrange “another periodic check on this by scientists.” That, however, would take time.

Among other records, the CIA has also withheld in its entirety a scientific intelligence report, from early 1962, on the Israeli nuclear program; it is currently under appeal with the Interagency Security Classification Appeals panel.

Documents 14A-D: Whether the IAEA Could Be Brought In

Document 14A: Nicolas G. Thacher to James P. Grant, “Your Appointment with Dennis Greenhill and Dennis Speares of the British Embassy,” 12 February 1962, Secret

Worried about the possibility of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, especially in light of Egyptian talks with West Germany about the acquisition of a reactor, the British wanted to find ways to meet Arab concerns about Dimona by bringing the site under scrutiny of the emerging IAEA safeguards/inspection system. The British recognized that achieving this would be very difficult – the Israelis objected to IAEA inspection because they professed to be worried about the inclusion of Soviet bloc officials on the inspection teams; moreover, the French, who had supplied the reactor and fuel elements, were also unlikely to accept international inspection of the irradiated fuel. Nevertheless, because Dimona was not yet an operating reactor (and the IAEA Safeguards Division was still being created), the British suggested preliminary, ad hoc steps, such as inspection by a “neutral” (in terms of the Arab-Israeli dispute) observer such as Canada. They believed that because of Israel’s reluctance, U.S. “pressure” would be required.

The State Department concurred with the objective of the British proposal: “we fully agree on the desirability of bringing Near East nuclear development under IAEA control.” Nevertheless, believing that Israeli and French objections were not likely to yield to “pressure,” State Department officials also favored pursuing such steps as visits by “neutral” scientists.. They believed, however, that Canada was not neutral enough because it was so closely associated with the IAEA; nor was Ottawa likely to get any more information than Washington could. Washington had been holding talks with the Swedes, but if they did not pan out, the U.S. could arrange a second visit by its scientists.

No documents about U.S. efforts to find a “neutral” visitor have surfaced so far, but apparently the Swedes expressed only “faint interest” in playing a role, which led Washington to decide to “undertake the responsibility once more.” As it had been over a year since the first visit, U.S. diplomats believed that if the Israelis agreed to another one it would provide an opportunity for Washington to preserve a “favorable atmosphere” in the region by making assurances about the reactor to Cairo and other Arab capitals (as long as the assurances were warranted). On 22 June, Talbot renewed the question with Ambassador Harman but the lack of response led Talbot to bring up the matter on 14 September. By then two AEC scientists were scheduled to visit the U.S.-financed reactor at Soreq in a matter of days and it made sense for them to include a visit to Dimona. Harman, however, said that no decision could be made until later in the month when Ben-Gurion was back from a European trip.

Never making a formal reply to the U.S. request, the Israelis used the ploy of an improvised visit to evade the substance of a real visit. As noted in the introduction, decades later an Israeli source confirmed to Avner Cohen that this was indeed a trick. While the two AEC scientists, Thomas Haycock and Ulysses Staebler, did not see the complete installation, they believed that they had enough time to determine that Dimona was a research reactor, not a production reactor, which, from their point of view, made the visit “satisfactory.” U.S. intelligence did not agree because the visit left unanswered questions, such as “whether in fact the reactor might give Israel a nuclear weapons capability.”

A few weeks after the visit, just as the Cuban Missile Crisis was unfolding, the State Department began to inform selected governments about its results. U.S. diplomats told Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, during a briefing on the Cuban situation, that the visit confirmed Israeli statements about the reactor. The British and Canadians were also told about the “recent brief visit” to Dimona, without explaining what had made it so short. By the end of October, the Department sent a fuller statement to embassies in the Middle East, as well as London, Paris, Ottawa, and Oslo.

[3]. In conversations Avner Cohen had with the late John Hadden, the CIA station chief in Israel during 1964-68, he made it apparent that his office was fully clear about “what was Dimona doing,” including reprocessing, and was not allowed to maintain any contact with the visiting AEC scientists. See also Israel and the Bomb 187-90.

[5]. Yuval Ne’eman told Avner Cohen about his “trick” on the visit of 1962 in many of the conversations during the 1990s and 2000s. When Cohen published Israel and the Bomb in 1998 he cited only a condensed version of Ne’eman tale—Ne’eman still considered it sensitive in the 1990s. Now, almost ten years after his passing (2006), Cohen is comfortable citing his tale in more detail.
According to Ne’eman in an interview conducted in March 1994, as the host of the two AEC scientists who had arrived to inspect the Soreq reactor (under the terms of the “Atoms for Peace” program) he “arranged” to take them for a tour of the Dead Sea. This was a well-planned pretext to bring them to Dimona on Israeli terms. So, on their way back, by late afternoon, as they were passing near the Dimona reactor, Ne’eman “spontaneously” suggested to arrange a quick visit at Dimona to say “hello” to the director whom inspector Staebler had known from the visit a year earlier, in May 1961. Ne’eman told them this was a great opportunity since their government was pressing for such a visit. The purpose was, of course, to have a much more informal and abbreviated visit rather than the formal one the US government wanted. In doing so, Israel would ease American pressure and convince the visitors that Dimona was a research reactor, not a production reactor. When the United States continued to press for a visit, Ne’eman told them, “you just did it.”

[6]. For more information on the visit, see Cohen, Israel and the Bomb, 105-108.

Plutonium processing is performed in the Plutonium Building (Building 4, Figure 4-32, Sheet 1), which is a two-story laboratory of approximately 151,000 ft2 (46,025 m2). The exterior walls and roof are of reinforced concrete. A concrete fire wall divides the building into two halves, each of which contains its own ventilation systems and electrical substations. One half of the process floor is divided by a central corridor into Areas 100 and 200. This half contains the plutonium research and development laboratories, the 238Pu operations, and the personnel decontamination area. The other half is divided into Areas 300 and 400 by another corridor. This half houses plutonium recovery, metal preparation and fabrication, and nondestructive analysis laboratories.

Each of the processing areas is further divided into a number of rooms that contain the gloveboxes for plutonium work. The ventilation systems that service the gloveboxes and all other utilities are located in the basement of the facility. The basement also houses critical support equipment, including all other ventilation equipment, the packing/unpacking room, waste-handling areas, the isopress laboratory, and the plutonium storage vault.

Three levels of containment are provided for plutonium processing. The primary confinement system includes gloveboxes, hoods, vessels, tanks, piping, and the glovebox ventilation exhaust system. The secondary confinement system includes the walls, floors, ceiling, and doors of the laboratories containing the gloveboxes, as well as the laboratory recirculation and bleed-off exhaust system. The exterior walls, floor, roof, and doors of the structure, along with the basement exhaust system, provide the tertiary confinement system.

The ventilation system in the facility has four zones, all of which are maintained at a lower pressure than that of the outside air. Air enters the two halves of the facility through an intake stack that has four ducts. Two ducts supply air to each half of the building. The ventilation system is designed so that each zone operates as a separate building with its own filtered exhaust stack. Exhaust from each confinement area is sent through at least two stages of HEPA filtration to prevent radioactive particles from being discharged to the environment.

The conveyor system in the facility transports contaminated material and equipment to almost any point on the first floor. Elevated stainless steel tunnels equipped with a trolley hoist system connect the gloveboxes. The vertical portions of the tunnels connect the overhead system to the gloveboxes at drop boxes located on the first floor. These drop boxes are the transfer points in which items are hoisted up to the trolley in the overhead tunnel system for eventual offsite waste disposal.

The criticality detection system monitors operations on the main processing floor of the Plutonium Facility and in the basement vault to detect gamma energy released from fission of SNM. The system is designed to detect conditions that could lead to a criticality accident in this facility and to sound an audible alarm. The alarm initiates immediate evacuation to minimize personnel exposure. This system consists of 20 Geiger-Mueller detector heads and associated circuitry located throughout the first-floor process areas and basement vault.

A continuous air-monitoring system is used to sample and analyze air from multiple points throughout the laboratory areas, basement, ductwork, and exhaust stacks. A continuous stream of sample air is drawn to a solid-state alpha detector, whose data are used for man/machine interface (lights, meter, squealer) and for monitoring by the operations center.

Other supporting systems include fire detection and suppression systems, a chilled-water system, an instrument air system, electrical power, water distribution systems, and a vacuum system. Voice communication is provided by a paging system and a telephone system. The emergency system provides paging throughout the TA-55 area and sounds the criticality and fire alarms.

4.32.2.1.1.2 Nuclear Materials Storage Facility

The Nuclear Materials Storage Facility (Building 41, Figure 4-32, Sheet 1) will eventually contain a significant amount of stored nuclear material. This facility is primarily intended for intermediate and long-term storage of SNM. Although completed in 1987, the Nuclear Materials Storage Facility has never operated because of design and construction deficiencies. A major renovation project is being planned to correct those deficiencies so that the facility can operate. The renovation project is expected to be completed by 2001.